Atwood

Nothing Special Nicole Flattery Inside Warhol's Factory Nothing Special is set in the grubby avant garde of Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, which, in 1966, when the story kicks off, was establishing itself as an artistic and cultural force to be reckoned with. Seventeen-year-old school drop-out Mae and her new friend, fellow Factory worker Shelley, are cut from precisely the same cloth as the jaded, affectless women who populated Flattery’s short stories:…

‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” muses Brecht in the Svendborg Poems. “Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” The impulse for lamentation in a crisis is instinctive and, perhaps, socially useful. But how we voice a response to catastrophe can be contentious, not least with the recent Covid pandemic. And while it may be too early to judge the overall effect of the crisis on the written word, we seem to have come out of it with more of a feeling of discord than harmony, and a sense that…

Margaret Atwood was “the only person who benefited from the election of Donald Trump”, her agent told her soon after the US presidential election in November 2016.The television drama version of The Handmaid’s Tale had begun filming in the run-up to Trump’s divisive win. “We woke up the morning after and there was Donald Trump, and we all said to ourselves, ‘we are now a different show’,” Atwood told an audience at the Hay literary festival.“Nothing about it had changed but the frame around it had changed. It was going…

Spanning nearly 20 years of writing, from 2004 onwards, Burning Questions is Margaret Atwood’s third book of essays and miscellaneous writing, all of which, she notes in the introduction, have been “tightly connected to their own time and place”. Why the title? “Possibly because the questions we’ve been faced with so far in the 21st century are more than urgent. Every age thinks that about its own crises, of course, but surely this era feels different. First, the planet. Is the world itself truly burning up? Is it we…

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which shared the Booker prize. Old Babes in the Wood is her first collection of stories since then – and since the death of her partner, Graeme Gibson, the same year. Atwood brings her trademark wit and invention to bear on subjects as diverse as a pandemic, cancel…

Most of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s latest book are old, or heading that way, and their stories unwrap what TS Eliot called the gifts reserved for age. There are chips and fragments of lives, full of sass and sadness. The book is in three parts: a miscellaneous collection of stories is sandwiched between sections called Tig and Nell and Nell and Tig. The Nell and Tig stories tell the tale of a long and loving marriage, and what comes after. (The book is dedicated to Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in…

Dear Stevie:Thank you for your letter. I hope your health remains good.It seems we must now begin a letter this way, with a Victorian tip of the hat to physical well-being: it’s become a social prerequisite, as leaving calling cards once was. And we must end by saying, “Keep safe.” What a ridiculous concept! There is no “safe”. At any moment the fragile thread by which we dangle may break, and we may plummet into the unknown. “Safe”, the word, ought to be outlawed. It gives people false ideas.Sorry. I’m becoming cranky…

Which author was this year elected to the US Senate? In what horror story does a vampire appear as a cat? Test your wits with questions set by authors including Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo, Ian Rankin and more Continue reading... Which author was this year elected to the US Senate? In what horror story does a vampire appear as a cat? Test your wits with questions set by authors including Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo, Ian Rankin and more Continue reading... FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here…

Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood, musician Dua Lipa, rock duo the Proclaimers and poet laureate Simon Armitage are to appear at Hay festival 2023.The festival today announced 32 early-bird events for its festival next year, which will take place from 25 May to 4 June in Hay-on-Wye in Wales.Atwood will speak about her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood, and Simon Armitage’s event will focus on his spoken world single Never Good With Horses. Dua Lipa will do a live recording of her podcast, At Your Service,…

When debut author Chelsea Banning vented on Twitter about no one showing up at her book signing, she didn’t expect that some of the world’s most famous authors, including Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman, would respond with tales of their own nightmare public appearances.“At my first Salem’s Lot signing, I had one customer. A fat kid who said, ‘Hey bud, do you know where there’s some Nazi books?’” King wrote to her.“Terry Pratchett and I did a signing in Manhattan for Good Omens that nobody came to at all. So…