Life in America: The Reagan Years, A Webography

Other Works by Atwood: The Short Fiction


Dancing Girls (1977)

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This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood's startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. Her men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in different rooms, different houses, or even different worlds. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition--and dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.  BUY IT HERE

Murder in the Dark (1983)

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These short fictions and prose poems are beautifully bizarre: bread can no longer be thought of as wholesome comforting loaves;  the pretensions of the male chef are subjected to a light roasting;  a poisonous brew is concocted by cynical five year olds;  and knowing when to stop is of deadly importance in a game of murder in the dark.  BUY IT HERE

Bluebeard's Egg (1983)

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"Conversations in our family were not about feelings," recalls the teenage narrator of "Hurricane Hazel"about her breakup with a boyfriend who "meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me"in Atwood's (The Handmaid's Tale, etc.) second collection of shortfiction. Unfortunately, the author's arch cleverness and cool understatement anesthetize the impact of the stories' conversations and gloomy relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Symbols abound and some, reminiscent of Atwood's "edible woman" cake in the book of the same title, are strained. In "Uglypuss," the discordant lovers are political activists; at one point they plan to picket a sock company and dramatize the crucifixion, portraying Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes. But the collection is somewhat redeemed by the affecting title story, where an egg is a deceptively innocuous object that, according to the legend, ultimately marks as disobedient two of Bluebeard's unfortunate wives aptly symbolizes the protagonist's premonitions of doom about her marriage to a man she is desperately afraid of losing, although she describes him as obtuse, blundering and predictable.  BUY IT HERE

Wilderness Tips (1991)

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Set mainly in Toronto or in the Canadian woods, the 10 beautifully controlled tales in Atwood's new collection testify to the unpredictability of life, its missed connections, unsolvable mysteries and the lightning passage of time. Most of them are refracted through the sensibilities and memories of female protagonists, who reflect on the moment when they realized that "nothing has turned out" as they expected. Past and present coalesce seamlessly in these stories; Atwood is particularly good at capturing the feelings of adolescence and the exact details that typify the culture of the decades from the '50s to the '90s. Events are seen at a distance, related in emotionally muted but acutely revealing prose. The hard-edged tone of "Hairball" perfectly conjures up the ruthless, manipulative protagonist who suddenly realizes that she has been bested by her obnoxious protege. Susanna, in "Uncles," has a similar comeuppance, as she, the consummate trickster who "can fake anything" is betrayed by her mentor. In both "The Bog Man" (the least successful tale, as here Atwood uncharacteristically veers toward melodrama) and "The Age of Lead" a body uncovered long after death serves as a metaphor for buried desires, opportunities and hopes. In the title story, Atwood observes the interrelationships among three sisters and the randy foreigner who has married one of them and made love to the other two. Atwood's ( Cat' s Eye ) uncompromising eye is enhanced by her sinewy, taut prose.  BUY IT HERE

Good Bones (1992)

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These wise and witty writings home in on Shakespeare, tree stumps, ecological disasters, bodies (male and female), and theology, amongst other matters. We hear Gertrude's version of what really happened in Hamlet; an ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves,and a reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong. Good Bones is pure distilled Atwood - deliciously strong and bittersweet.  BUY IT HERE

Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)

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If Atwood keeps a journal, perhaps some of the brief selections in this slender volume-postmodern fairy tales, caustic fables, inspired parodies, witty monologues-come from that source. The 35 entries offer a sometimes whimsical, sometimes sardonic view of the injustices of life and the battles of the sexes. Such updated fairy tales as "The Little Red Hen Tells All" (she's a victim of male chauvinism) and "Making a Man" (the Gingerbread man is the prototype) are seen with a cynical eye and told in pungent vernacular. "Gertrude Talks Back" is a monologue by Hamlet's mother, a randy woman ready for a roll in the hay, who is exasperated with her whiny, censorious teenage son. Several pieces feature women with diabolical intentions-witches, malevolent goddesses, etc. There are science fiction scenarios, anthropomorphic confessionals ("My Life as a Bat") and an indictment of overly aggressive women that out-Weldons Fay Weldon. While each of these entries is clever and sharply honed, readers will enjoy dipping into them selectively; a sustained reading may call up an excess of bile. Atwood has provided striking black-and-white illustrations.  BUY IT HERE

The Labrador Fiasco (1996)

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This short story collection incorporates two of Atwood's longstanding interests of Canadian history and the Canadian wilderness. Labrador refers to the Canadian place rather than the breed of dog.  BUY IT HERE

The Tent (2006)

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Biting anger, humor and interest in the fantastic have marked inimitable Atwood works like The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake. In this odd set of terse, mostly prose ripostes, Atwood takes stock of life and career—"this graphomania in a flimsy cave"—and finds both come up short. Staged from behind screens of updated fables and myths ("Salome Was a Dancer" begins "Salome went after the Religious Studies teacher"), the pieces rage icily against the constraints of gender, age (witheringly: "I have decided to encourage the young"), fame and even "Voice": "What people saw was me. What I saw was my voice, ballooning out in front of me like the translucent green membrane of a frog in full trill." Along with a few poems and childlike line drawings, what keeps this collection of 30-odd fictions from being a set of rants is the offhanded intimacy and acerbic self-knowledge with which Atwood delivers them: "The person you have in mind is lost. That's the picture I'm getting." Threaded throughout are dead-on asides on the tyrannies of time and the limits of truth telling in society, so that when Hoggy Groggy hires Foxy Loxy to silence Chicken Little forever, there is no doubt with whom the author's sympathies lie.  BUY IT HERE

Moral Disorder (2006)

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An intriguing patchwork of poignant episodes, Atwood's latest set of stories (after The Tent) chronicles 60 years of a Canadian family, from postwar Toronto to a farm in the present. The opening piece of this novel-in-stories is set in the present and introduces Tig and Nell, married, elderly and facing an uncertain future in a world that has become foreign and hostile. From there, the book casts back to an 11-year-old Nell excitedly knitting garments for her as yet unborn sister, Lizzie, and continues to trace her adolescence and young adulthood; Nell rebels against the stern conventions of her mother's Toronto household, only to rush back home at 28 to help her family deal with Lizzie's schizophrenia. After carving out a "medium-sized niche" as a freelance book editor, Nell meets Oona, a writer, who is bored with her marriage to Tig. Oona has been searching for someone to fill "the position of second wife," and she introduces Nell to Tig. Later in life, Nell takes care of her once vital but now ravaged-by-age parents. Though the episodic approach has its disjointed moments, Atwood provides a memorable mosaic of domestic pain and the surface tension of a troubled family.  BUY IT HERE