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The appearance of Margaret Atwood's first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted. Containing many of Atwood's best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General's Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry. This beautiful new edition of The Circle Game contains the complete collection, with an introduction by Sherrill E. Grace of the University of British Columbia.
Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), regarded by many as her most fully realized volume of poetry, is one of the great Canadian and feminist epics. In 1980, Margaret Atwood's longtime friend, the distinguished Canadian artist Charles Pachter, illustrated, designed, and published a handmade boxed portfolio edition of 120 copies of the poem with silkscreen prints, created as an act of homage to the poet. Atwood herself has said of Pachter's work, "His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes." The poem and the prints inspire one another. This is the first facsimile edition of the original, as well as the first one-volume American edition of the poem, with an introduction by Charles Pachter and a foreword by David Staines.
Margaret Atwood's Power Politics first appeared in 1971, startling its audience with its vital dance of woman and man. Thirty years later it still startles, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple and universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work.
Students and journalists; farmers and birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people or are they? In this splendid collection of short stories, Margaret Atwood maps the human motivation we scarcely know we have in a startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humour, and unexpected violence, these stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who evoke laughter, compassion, terror and recognition and dramatically demonstrate why Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.
Atwood's first new collection since 1974 reaffirms her status as a perceptive writer and includes her poetic musings on the violence of history, the awkwardness of love, the preciousness of time, and other topics
Poems stress the need to recognize the crimes of repressive regimes, the redeeming power of friendship, the unreliability of perception, and the mystery of nature
By turns humorous and warm, stark and poignant, these stories f rom the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments probe childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women can inflict on one another. A tenuous teenage love affair fails to survive a hurricane; a man notices the women around him becoming progressively paler and smaller; a surgeon who specializes in hearts seems oddly emotionally opaque to his wife; a middle-aged couple’s waning affection rekindles at the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds. In these exceptional short stories, Margaret Atwood proves herself once again a true master of the form.
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 loght 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.
Selected Poems 2 is an essential collection from the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Margaret Atwood, tracing her work from 1976-1986. Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Margaret Atwood is also one of our most significant contemporary poets. Selected Poems 2 presents her work in the decade following 1976—important years of change and new themes in her poetry. It includes selections from Two-Headed Poems (1978), True Stories (1981), Interlunar (1984), and prose poems from Murder in the Dark (1983). As in her fiction, Atwood ruminates on oppression and injustice and on the genders and their discontents, but beyond these surface dissonances we hear the music of compassion and fellowship and love. “Marked by an unflinching inspection of the world” ( New York Times Book Review ), Selected Poems 2 contains some of Atwood’s most extraordinary writing and is sure to captivate readers for years to come.
The bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments "uses her powerful gifts of language and observation to delineate both the misunderstandings between men and women and the everyday sadnesses and comforts of love” ( The New York Times). In each of these stories Atwood deftly illuminates the shape of a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. The past resurfaces in the present in ways both subtle and dramatic: the body of a lost Arctic explorer emerges from the ice, a 2,000-year-old bog man turns up in an archeological dig, a man with dark secrets marries his lover’s sister, a girl who disappears on a canoe trip haunts her friend many decades later. The richly layered stories in Wilderness Tips map interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and lost chances, endowing even the most unassuming of lives with a disquieting intensity.
Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965-1975, a volume of selections from Atwood's poetry of that decade.
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In this collection of miscellaneous writings by Margaret Atwood, Gertrude describes 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.
The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection ( Publishers Weekly ). These beautifully crafted poems, by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood’s most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.
The evolution of Margaret Atwood's poetry illuminates one of our major literary talents. Here, as in her novels, is intensity combined with sardonic detachment, and in these early poems her genius for a level stare at the ordinary is wonderfully apparent. Just as startling is her ability to contrast the everyday with the terrifying: 'Each time I hit a key/ on my electric typewriter/ speaking of peaceful trees/ another village explodes.' Her poetic voice is crystal clear, insistent, unmistakably her own. Through bus trips and postcards, wilderness and trivia, she reflects the passion and energy of a writer intensely engaged with her craft and the world. Two former collections, Poems 1965 - 1975 and Poems 1976 - 1986, are presented together with her latest collection, Morning in the Burned House, in this omnibus that represents the development of a major poet.
The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood's work. From the aunts who encouraged her nascent writing career to the influence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, we trace the movement of Atwood's fertile and curious mind in action over the years.Atwood's controversial political pieces, Napoleon's Two Biggest Mistakes and Letter to America -- both not-so-veiled warnings about the repercussions of the war in Iraq -- also appear, alongside pieces that exhibit her active concern for the environment, the North, and the future of the human race. Atwood also writes about her John Updike, Marina Warner, Italo Calvino, Marian Engel, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mordecai Richler, Elmore Leonard, and Ursula Le Guin.This is a landmark volume from a major writer whose worldwide readership is in the millions, and whose work has influenced and entertained generations. Moving Targets is the companion volume to Second Words.
One of the world’s most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark , punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the author. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian mini-fictions speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision. In pieces ranging in length from a mere paragraph to several pages, Atwood gives a sly pep talk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcerting experience of looking at old photos of ourselves; gives us Horatio's real views on Hamlet; and examines the boons and banes of orphanhood. “Bring Back Mom: An Invocation” explores what life was really like for the “perfect” homemakers of days gone by, and in “The Animals Reject Their Names,” she runs history backward, with surprising results. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, The Tent is vintage Atwood. Enhanced by the author’s delightful drawings, it is perfect for Valentine’s Day, and any other occasion that demands a special, out-of-the-ordinary gift.
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments • This brilliant collection of connected short stories strings together several decades of moments in the life of one woman—as an ambitious girl in the 1930s, as a young professional coming of age in the uncertain ‘50s and ‘60s, and as half of a couple growing old together. In a series of vividly evoked settings that span cities, backwoods, and farm country, we see this woman contending over time with an unstable sister, a married lover, aging parents, mystifying stepchildren, vulnerable farm animals, and her own changing self. By turns funny, lyrical, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Margaret Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage.
The Door, Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry since her award-winning Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. These fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood’s unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.
This cycle of poems is perhaps the most memorable evocation in modern Canadian literature of the myth of the wilderness, the immigrant experience, and the alienating and schizophrenic effects of the colonial mentality. Since it was first published in 1970 it has not only acquired the stature of a classic but, reprinted many times, become the best-known extended work in Canadian poetry. Susanna Moodie (1805-85) emigrated from England in 1832 to Upper Canada, where she settled on a farm with her husband. She wrote several books in Canada, notably Roughing It in the Bush, a famous account of pioneering that is still widely read. In poems about the arrival and the Moodies' seven years in the bush, which were followed by a more civilized ilfe in Belleville, and about Mrs Moodie in old age and then after death - in the present, when she observes the twentieth century destroying her past and its meaning - Margaret Atwood has created haunting meditations on an English gentlewoman's confrontation with the wilderness, and compelling variations on the themes of dislocation and alienation, nature and civilization. The poems are supplemented by Margaret Atwood's collages and an 'Afterword' in which the poet says: 'We are all imigrants to this place even if we were born here....'
A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood creativity, intelligence, and humor: think Alias Grace . Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder , with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace . A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in "Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In "The Freeze-Dried Bridegroom," a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. And in "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.
Can we ever be wholly free In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret Atwood holds a mirror up to our own world. The reflection we are faced with, of men and women in prisons literal and metaphorical, is frightening, but it is also a call to arms to speak and to act to preserve our freedom while we still can. And in that, there is hope.Selected from The Handmaids Tale and Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood.VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the worlds greatest writers on the experiences that make us human
A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood In Dearly , Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived. While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale , The Testaments , Oryx and Crake , among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments , a dazzling collection of short stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together "If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You’ve been missing out.” — The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Makkai, best-selling author of The Great Believers Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine —explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after. Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.
An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. “How can one live with such a heart?” Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the reader, and ferrying us through life, death, and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood’s journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears. Spanning six decades of work—from her earliest beginnings to brand new poems—this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors.