"[Burning Questions] reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her literature, feminism, the environment, human rights and their combustibility...The book s scope and the perspicacity of her writing evince the reading and thinking of a long life well lived." Washington Post
"Inspiring...Always in demand for her keen perception and bewitching storytelling, Atwood presents witty, parrying, and complexly illuminating tales about her long, ever-vital writing life." Booklist
"This collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter...Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven t flagged." Kirkus
Canadian poet, novelist and literary critic Margaret Atwood s diverse and intense interests in subjects from feminism to climate change are on full display in her latest book." Associated Press
"Atwood s writing voice is both accessible and compelling: she invites you in, and you want to keep reading...Despite the difficult truths told across these many pages, there is humor here and there is hope...This collection clearly shows what many of us already know, Atwood is one of our greatest writers, and although she claims to not be prophetic (ha!), we should all pay attention to what she s saying." The Brooklyn Rail
Praise for Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend. The New York Times Book Review
One of the most admired practitioners of the novel in North America. Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
"Brilliant...Atwood is a poet....as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous." The New Yorker
There may be no novelist better suited to tapping the current era s anxieties than Margaret Atwood. Entertainment Weekly
Introduction
Part I: 2004 to 2009 | What Will Happen Next? Scientific Romancing Frozen in Time From Eve to Dawn Polonia Somebody s Daughter Five Visits to the Word-Hoard The Echo Maker Wetlands Trees of Life, Trees of Death Ryszard Kapu ci ski Anne of Green Gables Alice Munro: An Appreciation Ancient Balances Scrooge A Writing Life
Part II: 2010 to 2013 | Art Is Our Nature The Writer as Political Agent? Really? Literature and the Environment Alice Munro The Gift Bring Up the Bodies Rachel Carson Anniversary The Futures Market Why I Wrote Maddaddam Seven Gothic Tales Doctor Sleep Doris Lessing How to Change the World?
Part III: 2014 to 2016 | Which Is to Be Master In Translationland On Beauty The Summer of the Stromatolites Kafka Future Library Reflections on The Handmaid s Tale We Are Double-Plus Unfree Buttons or Bows? Gabrielle Roy Shakespeare and Me Marie-Claire Blais Kiss of the Fur Queen We Hang by a Thread
Part IV: 2017 To 2019 | How Slippery Is the Slope? What Art Under Trump? The Illustrated Man Am I A Bad Feminist? We Lost Ursula Le Guin When We Needed Her Most Three Tarot Cards A Slave State? Oryx and Crake Greetings, Earthlings! What Are These Human Rights of Which You Speak? Payback Memory of Fire Tell. The. Truth.
Part V: 2020 to 2021 | Thought and Memory Growing Up in Quarantineland The Equivalents Inseparable We The Writing of The Testaments The Bedside Book of Birds Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death Caught in Time s Current Big Science Barry Lopez The Sea Trilogy
Acknowledgements Credits Index
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.