Fiction Short Stories (single Author)
The Tent
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- May 2007
- Category
- Short Stories (single author), Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, Mashups
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771008818
- Publish Date
- May 2007
- List Price
- $17.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
A collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays from one of the world's most celebrated authors, 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 essays speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.
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.
Excerpt: The Tent (by (author) Margaret Atwood)
Life Stories
Why the hunger for these? If it is a hunger. Maybe it’s more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge, of the life, no matter who lived it.
It helps if there are photos. No more choices for the people in them — pick this one, dump that one. The livers of the lives in question had their chances, most of which they blew. They should have spotted the photographer in the bushes, they shouldn’t have chewed with their mouths open, they shouldn’t have worn the strapless top, they shouldn’t have yawned, they shouldn’t have laughed: so unattractive, the candid denture. So that’s what she looked like, we say, connecting the snapshot to the year of the torrid affair. Face like a half-eaten pizza, and is that him, gaping down her front? What did he see in her, besides cheap lunch? He was already going bald. What was all the fuss about?
I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.
Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways? I can’t remember.
Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window. I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you’ve slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can’t recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?
I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.
I was born.
I was.
I.
Editorial Reviews
“Her wit is quicksilver, simultaneously succinct and elusive. . . . These nicely-turned fragments engage the imagination, and tease the mind.” —The Telegraph
“It rustles with all the shadowy power of an eerily prescient Atwoodian fable, by now its own genre.” —Globe and Mail
“Atwood infuses [her] bracing little narratives with the full force of her drollness, anger, shrewdness, sass, and humor.” —Booklist
“She never fails to entertain.” —Sunday Times (UK)
“Vintage Atwood, but there are enough twists and fresh takes in these acerbic musings to keep longtime readers interested and, perhaps, to hook those for whom Atwood is unfamiliar.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“[Atwood] is an accomplished miniaturist. . . . She can pack more wallop into less space than any other writer in her weight class.” —Globe and Mail
