Burning Questions
Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2022
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2023
- Category
- Essays, Women, Literary
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771096426
- Publish Date
- Sep 2023
- List Price
- $26.00
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes an brilliant collection of essays—funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient— which seek answers to Burning Questions such as:
Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
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 over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour 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 debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
About the author
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Editorial Reviews
"[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
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
