The Tent

Product Description <br/>A new collection of dazzling short fiction.<br/><br/>One of the world’s most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books<br/>Good Bones and<br/>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.<br/> Review <br/>“Her wit is quicksilver, simultaneously succinct and elusive...These nicely-turned fragments engage the imagination, and tease the mind.”<br/><br/>—Telegraph“It rustles with all the shadowy power of an eerily prescient Atwoodian fable, by now its own genre.”<br/><br/>— Globe and Mail<br/><br/>“[Atwood] is an accomplished miniaturist. . . . She can pack more wallop into less space than any other writer in her weight class.”<br/>—<br/>Globe and Mail<br/>“Atwood infuses [her] bracing little narratives with the full force of her drollness, anger, shrewdness, sass, and humor.”<br/>—<br/>Booklist<br/><br/>“She never fails to entertain.”<br/>—<br/>Sunday Times (U.K.)<br/><br/>“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.”<br/><br/>— San Francisco Chronicle<br/><br/><br/><br/>From the Trade Paperback edition.<br/> About the Author <br/>Margaret Atwood is the internationally celebrated author of more than forty books. Her most recent novels are<br/>The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize, and the internationally acclaimed<br/>Oryx and Crake. She lives in Toronto.<br/> Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. <br/>Life Stories<br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/>So that’s what she looked like, we say, connecting the snapshot to the year of the torrid affair.<br/>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?<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window.<br/>I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated,<br/>I said, I wrote, all gone now.<br/>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, an