4.0
Burning Questions
ByPublisher Description
In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions such as...
• Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and Atwood's other beloved works.
• How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
• How can we live on our planet?
• Is it true? And is it fair?
• What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?
In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood’s views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
• Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and Atwood's other beloved works.
• How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
• How can we live on our planet?
• Is it true? And is it fair?
• What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?
In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood’s views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
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4.0

Amy Marie
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Josh Ang
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“With her trademark acerbic wit and self-deprecating humour, Margaret Atwood delves into topics as diverse as literature and writing, feminism, human rights, climate change, the pandemic, extremist ideologies, and even economics (somewhat), in her new introduction to her 2008 prescient book about debt, “Payback”.
What is refreshing about these pieces, arranged chronologically from 2004 to 2022, is how much they reveal about her background, her beliefs and the burning hope lurking beneath the cynicism. She says in a 2020 piece on “The Writing of The Testaments”: ‘I write books about possible unpleasant futures in the hope that we will not allow these futures into reality.’
Atwood wears her heart on her sleeve: despite a very public ‘scolding’ by Ursula Le Guin about dismissing the label sf on her own work (which she has since defended and repositioned) and her remark on ‘talking squids in outer space’, she pays tribute to the latter in a piece after her death. There is also a short piece on fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro, and it is heartwarming to see how much she knew and cherished her peers. Both these writers are gone, but their creative works live on. And who knew Atwood had a soft spot for avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson’s seminal music album, “Big Science”.
Besides being always current and forward-looking, Atwood has a firm grip on history, and not just ‘his’-tory, but that of those whose accounts have been silenced or disregarded. She does not shy away from being on the side she thinks is right, even if it is an unpopular side, and in a piece candidly titled “Am I a Bad Feminist?”, she recounts her experience when she fell on the wrong side of the fence. It is interesting to see in all these non-fiction pieces how much of herself she puts in so you get a composite picture of the enigmatic Margaret Atwood.
Elsewhere readers of her work are treated to some of their backstories and inspiration. Her introductions to works by other authors also invite the reader to explore these authors and their works. She even takes apart Sartre’s dismissal of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel in one of the latter chapters.
I see the sorta-tongue-in-cheek piece, “Greetings Earthlings! What are these Human Rights of which You Speak?”, in which she takes on the stance of an alien in the guise of a frazzled old lady (i.e. Atwood herself in the flesh) as representative of the kind of satirical humour that she injects into serious issues that shows an author who is wise and bold enough to say what she wants to say in her own terms.
In the final part of this hefty volume which contains her 2020-2022 output, we find Atwood’s turning inwards with two different pieces on long-time partner Graeme Gibson in her introduction to his works, and the personal insights are laced with bittersweet reminiscences of a loved one who was slipping away with dementia and who eventually succumbed. The final three pieces are wrought with urgency as she contemplates the threats we are under, and what freedom and democracy means and how they should be protected.
Be it her lectures, addresses, essays, and other “occasional prose”, we have on record in this extraordinary volume the brilliant mind and intellect of a prolific and consistently engaging writer I am still rooting for to win the Nobel Prize.”

Jyoti
Created 3 months agoShare
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Cynlt
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About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Other books by Margaret Atwood
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