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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alias Grace'
In Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century.
Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.
Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend? A bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she the victim of circumstances? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blind Assassin'
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin , she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin , it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be--but, in fact, much more. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale , it is destined to become a classic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bluebeard's Egg'
Renowned novelist, poet, and short story writer Margaret Atwood has a gift unique among writers. In this marvelous collection of twelve short stories, Ms. Atwood writes of a woman who remembers her mother's favorite stories; a potter who tries to come to terms with the poets she lives with; a girl who agrees to go on a perilous raft trip because she is flattered to be invited, but knows herself unequal to the task. An extraordinary collection by an incomparable writer, Margaret Atwood is a writer to be read and savored and remembered. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bluebeards Eggs'
In this acclaimed collection of twelve stories, Margaret Atwood probes the territory of childhood memories and the casual cruelty men and women inflict upon each other and themselves. She looks behind the familiar world of family summers at remote lakes, ordinary lives, and unexpected loves, and she unearths profound truths. A melancholy, teenage love is swept away by a Canadian hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds; a potter tries to come to terms with the group of poets who so smother her that she is driven into the arms of her accountant; and, in the title story, the Bluebeard legend is retold as an ironic tale of marital deception. Stark and scathing at times, humorous and compassionate at others, Bluebeards Egg confirms once again Atwoods reputation as the pre-eminent chronicler of our times. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bodily Harm'
A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.
Margaret Atwood is the author of over twenty-five books, including fiction, poetry, and essays. Among her most recent works are the bestselling novels Alias Grace and The Robber Bride and the collections Wilderness Tips and Good Bones and Simple Murders. She lives in Toronto. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cat's Eye'
Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman--but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cayman Islands: The Beach & Beyond'
From the author of the critically acclaimed "The Handmaid's Tale" comes this 2000 novel-within-a-novel centering on entangled relationships in 1930s-40s Ontario, Canada. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dancing Girls'
This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood's startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. Each of the fourteen stories shimmers with feelings, each illuminates the interior landscape of a woman's mind. Here 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 on the most important writers in English today. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Edible Woman'
Margaret Atwood was already a mature writer when she wrote her first novel, The Edible Woman, in her mid-20s. The elements readers admire in her later fiction--edgy comedy, Gothic undertones, and a mordantly ironic view of contemporary society--are all present. The Edible Woman remains as delectably fresh and original as it was in the 1960s.
Her main character, Marian McAlpin, has a very contemporary problem. She feels alienated: constrained by her market-research job, ambivalent about her engagement to the "nicely packaged" but dull Peter, and alarmed by the prospect of her friends embarking on chaotic motherhoods. In a narrative jammed with images of food, body parts, advertising, and shiny surfaces, Marian feels like a commodity to be portioned out, wrapped up, and consumed. Acquiescing to a degree, she also rebels: she virtually stops eating, and she constantly flees from Peter in favour of the dubious alternative represented by Duncan, a bizarre student with a fetish for ironing. Vulnerable but empowered, tangled up in a world from which she is also acerbically detached, Marian is a classic Atwood heroine. The novel's ambiguous resolution, involving a woman-shaped cake that Marian solemnly decapitates and serves to her significant others, may seem heavy-handed. But it does drive home Atwood's pointed satire of an insidious consumer culture that convinces young people--and women in particular--that their identities and choices can be pulled from a shelf. That message is as relevant as ever. The Edible Womanhas no best-before date. --John C. Ball [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Bones'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Bones and Simple Murders'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Handmaid's Tale'
Throughout her career, Margaret Atwood has played with different literary genres in her novels--historical fiction (Alias Grace), pulp fiction (The Blind Assassin), the comedy of manners (The Robber Bride)--but no foray into genre fiction has been as successful as her turn to speculative fiction in The Handmaid's Tale. Published in 1985, it echoes Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, but a vibrant feminism drives Atwood's portrait of a futuristic dystopia. In the Republic of Gilead, we see a world devastated by toxic chemicals and nuclear fallout and dominated by a repressive Christian fundamentalism. The birthrate has plunged, and most women can no longer bear children. Offred is one of Gilead's Handmaids, who as official breeders are among the chosen few who can still become pregnant.
The Handmaid's Tale is an imaginatively audacious novel that is at once a page-turning psychological thriller, a moving love story, and a chilling warning about what might be waiting for us around the corner. What ultimately makes it stand out is Atwood's ability to balance a passionate political statement with finely wrought literary fiction. The Handmaid's Tale is a remarkable work by one of Canada's most inventive writers. --Jeffrey Canton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lady Oracle'
Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy. In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life Before Man'
Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale'
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Bloom's Guides collection, presents concise critical excerpts from The Handmaid's Tale to provide a scholarly overview of the work. This comprehensive study guide also features "The Story Behind the Story," which details the conditions under which The Handmaid's Tale was written. This title also includes a short biography on Margaret Atwood and a descriptive list of characters. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale'
Atwood's best-known novel depicts one woman's struggle to survive in a futuristic society in which women have become property.
The title, Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Margaret Atwood, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moral Disorder: And Other Stories'
Margaret Atwood is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of our time. In Moral Disorder, she has created a series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with itthose of parents, of siblings, of children, of friends, of enemies, of teachers, and even of animals. As in a photograph album, time is measured in sharp, clearly observed moments. The 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the present all are here. The settings vary: large cities, suburbs, farms, northern forests.
The Bad News is set in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. The narrative then switches time as the central character moves through childhood and adolescence in The Art of Cooking and Serving, The Headless Horseman, and My Last Duchess. We follow her into young adulthood in The Other Place and then through a complex relationship, traced in four of the stories: Monopoly, Moral Disorder, White Horse, and The Entities. The last two stories, "The Labrador Fiasco" and "The Boys at the Lab," deal with the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.
By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwoods celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. As the New York Times has said: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Morning in the Burned House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Negotiation with the Dead'
After having been through the "wash-and-spin cycle" a few times, Margaret Atwood realized that her "own experience in the suds may be relevant to others." Thus was born Negotiating with the Dead, six essays about what it means to be a writer, particularly a female writer. Each essay explores one aspect of writerly contemplation: art vs. commerce; the ideal reader; the separation between the part of a person that writes and the part that lives; and, as the title suggests, the constant presence of those who came before (both writers and other ancestors). Atwood relates her own experiences as a female poet (to be taken seriously, it would have helped to commit suicide) and as a bestselling novelist (whether your books are good or bad, sell well or don't, people will look down at you for it). These are intriguing meditations, with references to works by Virgil, Isak Dinesen, Robertson Davies, and countless others (Atwood's own dead, no doubt). --Jane Steinberg [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oryx and Crake'
In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.
While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Penelopiad'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Robber Bride'
Exploring the paradox of female villainy, this tale of three fascinating women is another peerless display of literary virtuosity by the supremely gifted author of Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale. Roz, Charis and Tony all share a wound, and her name is Zenia. Beautiful, smart and hungry, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless, Zenia is the turbulent center of her own neverending saga. She entered their lives in the sixties, when they were in college. Over the three decades since, she has damaged each of them badly, ensnaring their sympathy, betraying their trust, and treating their men as loot. Then Zenia dies, or at any rate the three women -- with much relief -- attend her funeral. But as The Robber Bride begins, Roz, Charis and Tony have come together at a trendy restaraunt for their monthly lunch when in walks the seemingly resurrected Zenia... In this consistently entertaining and profound new novel, Margaret Atwood reports from the farthest reaches of the war between the sexes with her characteristic well-crafted prose, rich and devious humor, and compassion. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Surfacing'
First published in 1972, Surfacing was Margaret Atwood's second novel, following the critically acclaimed The Edible Woman. Atwood had already made her mark as a one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian poetry, winning the Governor General's Award in 1966 for The Circle Game, while her groundbreaking book of criticism, Survival, had started the process of redefining the meaning of Canadian literature.
In Surfacing, poetry and prose brilliantly come together in a heart-wrenching novel that focuses on a woman's desperate attempt to put the ghosts of her past to rest. With three friends, she's returned to the remote cabin in Northern Quebec where she spent her childhood. She's overwhelmed, almost to the point of emotional paralysis, by memories of her father and his death by drowning, her failed marriage and painful divorce, and an abortion that haunts her waking dreams. While she appears to be ambivalent about the landscape, it is the landscape that in fact will provide her with the means of healing herself and her broken spirit. Like Atwood's poetry of this period, Surfacing is a deeply psychological novel. Atwood uses the recurring image of surfacing from beneath the waves of an icy northern lake as a symbol of this woman's struggle to regain control of her life, to refuse to be a victim of her past. Surfacing is a poignant novel filled with the power of the Canadian wilderness to cleanse the soul, an image of the wilderness that has remained a preoccupation for Atwood throughout her writing career. --Jeffrey Canton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tent'
One of the worlds 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 authors delightful drawings, it is perfect for Valentines Day, and any other occasion that demands a special, out-of-the-ordinary gift. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wilderness Tips'
An award-winning collection of ten stories that charts the complexities of modern life and explores the strange and secret places of the heart. The gruesome discoveries of an archaeological dig in Britain find parallels in a contemporary love affair; a girl disappears without a trace and returns to haunt a collection of landscape paintings; a nineteenth-century case of mass-poisoning on the famous Franklin Expedition stirs memories of a dead friend; a woman exacts a fittingly wicked revenge on her ex-lover; a well-known journalist is betrayed by a former mentor and friend. Brilliantly rendered, disturbing, poignant at times, scathingly humorous at others, Wilderness Tips imbues the familiar world in which we live with indelible truths.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wilderness Tips'
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