Margaret Atwood Books In Order

The Handmaid’s Tale Books In Publication Order

  1. The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
  2. The Testaments (2019)

MaddAddam Books In Publication Order

  1. Oryx and Crake (2003)
  2. The Year of the Flood (2009)
  3. MaddAddam (2013)

Angel Catbird Graphic Novels In Publication Order

  1. Angel Catbird, Volume 1 (2016)
  2. Angel Catbird, Volume 2: To Castle Catula (2017)
  3. Angel Catbird, Volume 3: The Catbird Roars (2017)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Edible Woman (1969)
  2. Surfacing (1972)
  3. Lady Oracle (1976)
  4. Up in the Tree (1978)
  5. Life Before Man (1979)
  6. Bodily Harm (1981)
  7. Cat’s Eye (1988)
  8. For the Birds (1990)
  9. The Robber Bride (1993)
  10. Alias Grace (1996)
  11. The Labrador Fiasco (1996)
  12. The Blind Assassin (2000)
  13. Bottle (2004)
  14. The Heart Goes Last (2015)

Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. Moral Disorder (2014)
  2. The Bad News (2018)
  3. War Bears (2019)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Anna’s Pet (1980)
  2. Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
  3. Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
  4. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)
  5. Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery (2011)
  6. A Trio of Tolerable Tales (2017)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Survival (1972)
  2. Days Of The Rebels (1977)
  3. Second Words (1982)
  4. The Canlit Foodbook (1987)
  5. Margaret Atwood Conversations (1990)
  6. Strange Things (1995)
  7. Two Solicitudes (1996)
  8. Story of a Nation (2001)
  9. Negotiating with the Dead (2002)
  10. Curious Pursuits (2005)
  11. Writing With Intent (2005)
  12. Payback (2007)
  13. Glances at Germany, Poland, and the Euxine (2009)
  14. In Other Worlds (2011)
  15. Dire Cartographies (2015)
  16. The Burgess Shale (2017)
  17. Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces (2022)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Circle Game (1964)
  2. The Animals in that Country (1968)
  3. The Journals of Susanna Moodie (With: Charles Pachter) (1970)
  4. Procedures For Underground (1970)
  5. Power Politics (1971)
  6. You Are Happy (1974)
  7. Selected Poems (1976)
  8. Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1977)
  9. Two-Headed Poems (1978)
  10. True Stories (1981)
  11. Bluebeard’s Egg (1983)
  12. Murder in the Dark (1983)
  13. Interlunar (1984)
  14. Selected Poems II (1986)
  15. Wilderness Tips (1991)
  16. Good Bones (1992)
  17. Poems 1976-1986 (1992)
  18. Polarities. Selected Stories (1994)
  19. Bones & Murder (1994)
  20. Morning in the Burned House (1995)
  21. Eating Fire (1998)
  22. Moving Targets (2004)
  23. The Tent (2006)
  24. Moral Disorder and Other Stories (2006)
  25. The Door (2007)
  26. The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie (2014)
  27. Stone Mattress (2014)
  28. Freedom (2018)
  29. Dearly (2020)

Hogarth Shakespeare Books In Publication Order

  1. The Gap of Time (By:Jeanette Winterson) (2015)
  2. Shylock Is My Name (By:Howard Jacobson) (2016)
  3. Vinegar Girl (By:Anne Tyler) (2016)
  4. Hag-Seed (2016)
  5. Dunbar (By:Edward St. Aubyn) (2017)

Canongate’s The Myths Books In Publication Order

  1. A Short History of Myth (By:) (2004)
  2. The Penelopiad (2005)
  3. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (By:Jeanette Winterson) (2005)
  4. Where Three Roads Meet (By:) (2005)
  5. The Goddess Chronicle (By:) (2008)

Imaginarium Books In Publication Order

  1. Imaginarium 2011: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (By:,Sandra Kasturi) (2011)
  2. Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (By:Tanya Huff,,Cory Doctorow,,Sandra Kasturi,,,,Dave Duncan,Susie Moloney) (2013)
  3. Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (With: Kelley Armstrong,Peter Watts,,,,Cory Doctorow,Nalo Hopkinson,A.M. Dellamonica,,,,,,,Amal El-Mohtar,,,,Rio Youers,Sandra Kasturi,,,,Silvia Moreno-Garcia) (2014)
  4. Imaginarium 5: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (By:Sandra Kasturi) (2017)

Tesseracts Books In Publication Order

  1. Tesseracts (By:Judith Merril) (1985)
  2. Tesseracts² (By:Phyllis Gotlieb) (1987)
  3. Tesseracts 3 (With: William Gibson,Charles de Lint,Phyllis Gotlieb,Michael Skeet,Peter Watts,Judith Merril,,,,,,Élisabeth Vonarburg,,,,,,,,Dave Duncan) (1990)
  4. Tesseracts 4 (By:Michael Skeet,Lorna Toolis) (1992)
  5. Tesseracts 5 (By:Yves Meynard,Robert Runté) (1996)
  6. Tesseracts 6 (By:Robert J. Sawyer,Carolyn Clink) (1997)
  7. Tesseracts 7 (By:David Annandale,Michael Skeet,,Cory Doctorow,,,Yves Meynard,,,Shirley Meier,Carolyn Clink,,Élisabeth Vonarburg) (1998)
  8. Tesseracts 8 (By:Cory Doctorow,,A.M. Dellamonica,,,Yves Meynard,,,,Sandra Kasturi) (2002)
  9. TesseractsQ (By:Élisabeth Vonarburg,Jane Brierley) (2002)
  10. Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction (By:,Nalo Hopkinson) (2005)
  11. Tesseracts Ten (By:Edo Van Belkom) (2006)
  12. Tesseracts Eleven (By:,Cory Doctorow) (2007)
  13. Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction (By:Michael Skeet) (2008)
  14. Tesseracts Thirteen (By:Nancy Kilpatrick) (2009)
  15. Tesseracts 14: Strange Canadian Stories (By:) (2010)
  16. Tesseracts Fifteen (By:Julie E. Czerneda) (2011)
  17. Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound (By:Kevin J. Anderson,Robert J. Sawyer,,,,Neil Peart,,Carolyn Clink,Sandra Kasturi) (2012)
  18. Superhero Universe (By:) (2016)
  19. Compostela (By:Spider Robinson) (2017)

Best American Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. The Best Short Stories of 1915 (1916)
  2. The Best Short Stories of 1916 (1916)
  3. The Best Short Stories of 1917 (1917)
  4. The Best Short Stories of 1918 (1918)
  5. The Best Short Stories of 1919 (1919)
  6. The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1921)
  7. The Best Short Stories of 1922 (1922)
  8. The Best Short Stories of 1923 (1923)
  9. The Best Short Stories 1924 (1924)
  10. The Best Short Stories of 1925 (1925)
  11. The Best Short Stories 1926 (1926)
  12. The Best Short Stories 1927 (1927)
  13. The Best Short Stories of 1928 (1928)
  14. The Best Short Stories of 1929 (1929)
  15. The Best Short Stories 1930 (1930)
  16. The Best Short Stories 1931 (1931)
  17. The Best Short Stories of 1932 (1932)
  18. The Best Short Stories 1933 (1933)
  19. The Best Short Stories 1934 (1934)
  20. The Best Short Stories 1935 (1935)
  21. The Best Short Stories 1936 (1936)
  22. The Best Short Stories 1937 (1937)
  23. The Best Short Stories of 1938 (1938)
  24. 50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 (1939)
  25. The Best Short Stories 1939 (1939)
  26. The Best Short Stories of 1940 (1940)
  27. The Best Short Stories 1941 (1941)
  28. The Best American Short Stories 1942 (1942)
  29. The Best American Short Stories 1943 (1943)
  30. The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944)
  31. The Best American Short Stories 1945 (1945)
  32. The Best American Short Stories 1946 (1946)
  33. The Best American Short Stories 1947 (1947)
  34. The Best American Short Stories 1948 (1948)
  35. The Best American Short Stories 1949 (1949)
  36. The Best American Short Stories 1950 (1950)
  37. The Best American Short Stories 1951 (1951)
  38. The Best American Short Stories 1952 (1952)
  39. The Best American Short Stories 1953 (1953)
  40. The Best American Short Stories 1955 (1955)
  41. The Best American Short Stories 1956 (1956)
  42. The Best American Short Stories 1957 (1957)
  43. The Best American Short Stories 1958 (1958)
  44. The Best American Short Stories 1959 (1959)
  45. The Best American Short Stories 1960 (1960)
  46. The Best American Short Stories 1961 (1961)
  47. The Best American Short Stories 1962 (1962)
  48. The Best American Short Stories 1963 (1963)
  49. The Best American Short Stories 1964 (1964)
  50. The Best American Short Stories 1965 (1965)
  51. The Best American Short Stories 1966 (1966)
  52. The Best American Short Stories 1967 (1967)
  53. The Best American Short Stories 1968 (1967)
  54. The Best American Short Stories of 1969 (1969)
  55. The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970)
  56. The Best American Short Stories 1971 (1971)
  57. The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972)
  58. The Best American Short Stories 1973 (1973)
  59. The Best American Short Stories 1974 (1974)
  60. The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 (1975)
  61. The Best American Short Stories 1975 (1975)
  62. The Best American Short Stories 1976 (1976)
  63. The Best American Short Stories 1977 (1977)
  64. The Best American Short Stories 1978 (1978)
  65. The Best American Short Stories 1979 (1979)
  66. The Best American Short Stories 1980 (1980)
  67. The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981)
  68. The Best American Short Stories 1982 (1982)
  69. The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983)
  70. The Best American Short Stories 1984 (1984)
  71. The Best American Short Stories 1985 (1985)
  72. The Best American Short Stories 1986 (1986)
  73. The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987)
  74. The Best American Short Stories 1988 (1988)
  75. The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989)
  76. The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990)
  77. The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990)
  78. The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)
  79. The Best American Short Stories 1992 (1992)
  80. The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993)
  81. The Best American Short Stories 1994 (1994)
  82. The Best American Short Stories 1995 (1995)
  83. The Best American Short Stories 1996 (1996)
  84. The Best American Short Stories 1997 (1997)
  85. The Best American Short Stories 1998 (1998)
  86. The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999)
  87. The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000)
  88. The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000)
  89. The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)
  90. The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002)
  91. The Best American Short Stories 2003 (2003)
  92. The Best American Short Stories 2004 (2004)
  93. The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005)
  94. The Best American Short Stories 2006 (2006)
  95. The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007)
  96. The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (2007)
  97. The Best American Short Stories1921 (2007)
  98. The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008)
  99. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (2009)
  100. The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010)
  101. The Best American Short Stories 2011 (2011)
  102. The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012)
  103. The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)
  104. The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014)
  105. The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015)
  106. 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015)
  107. The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016)
  108. The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017)
  109. The Best American Short Stories 2018 (2018)
  110. The Best American Short Stories 2019 (2019)
  111. The Best American Short Stories 2020 (2020)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories (1990)
  2. Tesseracts 3 (1990)
  3. Ten (1996)
  4. Crimespotting (2009)
  5. I’m With the Bears (2011)
  6. Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (2012)
  7. The World Split Open (2014)
  8. Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2014)
  9. Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (2019)

The Handmaid’s Tale Book Covers

MaddAddam Book Covers

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Short Stories Book Covers

Picture Book Covers

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Anthologies Book Covers

Margaret Atwood Books Overview

The Handmaid’s Tale

Book Jacket Status: JacketedA gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time. Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules. Like Aldous Huxley s Brave New World and George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty Four, The Handmaid’s Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.

Oryx and Crake

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker PrizeMargaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly all too likely to be true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood’s riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes into his own past, and back to Crake’s high tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. From the Hardcover edition.

The Year of the Flood

BONUS FEATURE: INCLUDES ORIGINAL MUSIC WITH LYRICS COMPOSED BY THE AUTHORThe long awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God’s Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren’s bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers…
Meanwhile, gene spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo’hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can’t stay locked away…
By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

The Edible Woman

Margaret Atwood’s internationally renowned first novel has been brilliantly adapted for stage by playwright Dave Carley. With wit, affection and dollops of irony, The Edible Woman traces the journey of Marian, a young woman who has embraced the consumer society. Marian has a good job, a handsome lawyer fianc , and a conventionally bright future. But slowly Marian s consumer world starts slipping out of focus, as she begins instead to identify with the things consumed. Compounding Marian s confusion is her newly pregnant roommate, her incensed landlady, and that strange young man she just kissed at the laundromat

Surfacing

Part detective novel, part physiological thriller, ‘Surfacing‘ is the story of a young woman who returns to northern Quebec, to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and two friends, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realize that going home means entering not only another place, but another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she discovers that what she is really searching for is her own past. Permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond sharp prose, ‘Surfacing‘ has grown in reputation as a novel unique in modern literature for its mythic exploration of one woman’s spiritual pilgrimage.

Lady Oracle

Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban the bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada’s new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy. In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time.

Up in the Tree

Playful, whimsical, and wry, Margaret Atwood’s story about two children who live up in a tree has attained classic status. When this charming book was first published in 1978, conventional wisdom stated that it was too expensive and risky to publish a children’s book in Canada. So Atwood not only wrote and illustrated the book herself, she also hand-lettered the type! The original edition of Up in the Tree was created the old-fashioned way, using only two colors that mixed together to produce a surprisingly large range of tones and textures, and this painstakingly created facsimile edition delivers intact to readers young and old the unique pleasures of the original. A wonderful story in a beautiful package, Up in the Tree is now ready for a new generation of readers.

Life Before Man

Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth’s dead lover…
and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.

Bodily Harm

A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love. Margaret Atwood is the author of over twenty five books, including fiction, poetry, and essays. Among her most recent works are the bestselling novels Alias Grace and The Robber Bride and the collections Wilderness Tips and Good Bones and Simple Murders. She lives in Toronto.

Cat’s Eye

Controversial painter Elaine Risley returns from Vancouver for a retrospective of her work. Here, in Toronto, the city of her youth, she confronts the submerged layers of her past her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self righteous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love in diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand. The realm of childhood and growing up, with its secrecies, cruelties, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so brilliantly evoked. By turns disquieting, humorous, compassionate, haunting and mordant, Cat’s Eye is vintage Atwood. From the Hardcover edition.

The Robber Bride

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is inspired by ‘The Robber Bridegroom,’ a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. All three ‘have lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them. To Tony, who almost lost her husband and jeopardized her academic career, Zenia is ‘a lurking enemy commando.’ To Roz, who did lose her husband and almost her magazine, Zenia is ‘a cold and treacherous bit*ch.’ To Charis, who lost a boyfriend, quarts of vegetable juice and some pet chickens, Zenia is a kind of zombie, maybe ‘soulless” Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review. In love and war, illusion and deceit, Zenia’s subterranean malevolence takes us deep into her enemies’ pasts.

Alias Grace

In the astonishing new novel by the author of the bestsellers The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto’s lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up and coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story, from her family’s difficult passage out of Ireland into Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas Kinnear’s household. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot remember, he hears of the turbulent relationship between Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery, and of the alarming behavior of Grace’s fellow servant, James McDermott. Jordan is drawn to Grace, but he is also baffled by her. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend, a bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she a victim of circumstances?Alias Grace is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that reclaims a profoundly mysterious and disturbing story from the past century. With compassion, an unsentimental lyricism, and her customary narrative virtuosity, Margaret Atwood mines the often convoluted relationships between men and women, and between the affluent and those without position. The result is her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid’s Tale in short, vintage Atwood.

The Blind Assassin

10 cassettes, 17 hoursPerformance by Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. For the past twenty five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge.’ They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel within a novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clich’s of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be but, in fact, much more. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is destined to become a classic.

Anna’s Pet

This volume in the Kids of Canada series follows a young city girl’s exploration of the countryside, showing what she finds there. Anna searches for a pet on her grandparent’s farm: will it be a toad? A Worm? A Snake? Each choice she makes teaches her about these creatures and the world they inhabit and, ultimately, about herself. In a charming and playful manner, Atwood and Barkhouse evoke the relationship between a child and the natural world. 20111007

Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut

Pampered and spoiled in her pink palace, Princess Pruella dreams of marrying a pinheaded prince who will praise and pamper her with an abundant supply of money, until a wise and mysterious woman puts a purple peanut on the princess’s upturned nose.

Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes

In Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, bestselling author Margaret Atwood offers a delightfully ridiculous tale about the virtues of resisting restrictions. With tongue twisting phrases heavily peppered with words beginning with R, the story follows Ramsay as he travels with his friend Ralph, the red nosed rat, from his home full of revolting relatives to a field of roaring radishes. There he meets a girl named Rillah, who needs a bit of adventure herself. Atwood’s rollicking text is accompanied by devilish and Du an Petricic’s insightful illustrations.

Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda

Bob never knew he was a human boy, after being abandoned outside a beauty parlor and then raised by a bunch of dogs. He barked at businessmen and burrowed under bushes. Fortunately for Bob, dimple faced Dorinda, a distressed damsel down on her luck, found him and taught him how to be a real boy. When a bureaucratic blunder puts the town in jeopardy, only Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda can save everyone from a dreadful disaster. Combined with Du an Petricic’s whimsical illustrations, Margaret Atwood’s cleverly written, alliterative picture book will challenge and delight readers of all ages.

Survival

When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction? Her answer is Survival and victims. Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives.

Second Words

Fifty of Margaret Atwood’s finest essays and reviews from 1960 to 1982 are included in this collection of her key critical writings. Wit and originality infuse discussions of the writing process, literary life, and such literary figures as Adrienne Rich, Northrop Frye, Anne Sexton, and E. L. Doctorow. Atwood’s perspectives on Canadian nationalism and the American dream emerge, as do her controversial attitudes about feminism, sexism, and contemporary North American life. This largest collection of her critical prose showcases the human insight and sharp intellect that has distinguished Atwood as one of the most compelling writers of the 21st century.

Strange Things

The internationally celebrated author of more than twenty five books of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most esteemed literary figures. She has won many literary awards, her work has been translated into twenty two languages, her novel The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter, and her most recent book, The Robber Bride, was on the New York Times bestseller list in cloth and paper for months. In Strange Things, Atwood turns to the literary imagination of her native land, as she explores the mystique of the Canadian North and its impact on the work of writers such as Robertson Davies, Alice Munroe, and Michael Ondaatje. Here readers will delight in Atwood’s stimulating discussion of stories and storytelling, myths and their recreations, fiction and fact, and the weirdness of nature. In particular, she looks at three legends of the Canadian North. She describes the mystery of the disastrous Franklin expedition in which 135 people disappeared into the uncharted North. She examines the ‘Grey Owl syndrome’ of white writers who turn primitive. And she looks at the terrifying myth of the cannibalistic, ice hearted Wendigo the gruesome Canadia snow monster who can spot the ice in your own heart and turn you into a Wendigo. Atwood shows how these myths have fired the literary imagination of her native Canada and have deeply colored essential components of its literature. And in a moving, final chapter, she discusses how a new generation of Canadian women writers have adapted the imagery of the North to explore contemporary themes of gender, the family, and sexuality. Written with the delightful style and narrative grace which will be immediately familiar to all of Atwood’s fans, this superbly crafted and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.

Negotiating with the Dead

What is the role of the Writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain or excuse! their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as ‘gifted’, who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift? Atwood’s wide reference to other writers, living and dead, is balanced by anecdotes from her own experiences, both in Canada and elsewhere. The lightness of her touch is offset by a seriousness about the purpose and the pleasures of writing, and by a deep familiarity with the myths and traditions of western literature. Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Quebec, Ontario, 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 thirty years of writing, Atwood has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. Hew newest novel, The Blind Assassin, won the 2000 Booker Prize for Fiction. She is the author of more than twenty five volumes of poetry, fiction, and non fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include Alias Grace 1996, The Robber Bride 1994, Cat’s Eye 1988, The Handmaid’s Tale 1983, Surfacing 1972 and The Edible Woman 1970. Acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal lives and worldly problems of universal concern, Atwood’s work has been published in more than thirty five languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic, and Estonian.

Writing With Intent

From one of the world’s most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing With Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award winning author’s first book length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood’s worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize winning author’s reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell’s 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk’s Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her ‘Letter to America,’ written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood’s career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

Payback

Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of debt a timely subject during our current period of economic upheaval, caused by the collapse of a system of interlocking debts. In her wide ranging, entertaining, and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that debt is like air something we take for granted until things go wrong. And then, while gasping for breath, we become very interested in it.

Payback is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon these subjects. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By investigating how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day through the stories we tell each other, through our concepts of ‘balance,’ ‘revenge,’ and ‘sin,’ and in the way we form our social relationships, Atwood shows that the idea of what we owe one another in other words, ‘debt’ is built into the human imagination and is one of its most dynamic metaphors.

In Other Worlds

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as ‘science fiction, a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: ‘Flying Rabbits,’ which begins with Atwood’s early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; ‘Burning Bushes,’ which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and ‘Dire Cartographies,’ which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood’s key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences as she sees them between ‘science fiction’ proper, and ‘speculative fiction,’ as well as between ‘sword and sorcery/fantasy’ and ‘slipstream fiction.’ For all readers who have loved The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must.

The Circle Game

The appearance of Margaret Atwood’s first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we’ve come to know in later works. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted. Containing many of Atwood’s best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (With: Charles Pachter)

The landmark collaboration of two pre eminent Canadian artists in an attractive, affordable format. As fledgling artists in their respective fields, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter were enthusiastic collaborators in a unique art form, the livre d’artiste the marriage of original graphic work with literary text. Beginning in the mid sixties, while both were still students, they worked together on five limited edition handmade books, volumes of Atwood’s poetry with Pachter’s interpretive artwork. The culmination of their collaboration, the work that is considered their masterpiece, is The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In her reading of Susanna Moodie’s chronicles of pioneer life in nineteenth century Canada, Atwood found the haunting and timeless themes that still obsess us. The poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie were first published in 1970 in a standard format. This sequence of poems is regarded as a classic, in addition to being connected with her later novel, Alias Grace. In 1980, Pachter was able to add his own vibrant, evocative images and create the version they had dreamt of: a hand set, hand printed illustrated limited edition of 120 numbered copies. This popular edition is a faithful re creation of the original, accompanied by an introductory memoir by Pachter, describing his friendship with Atwood and the creative process behind this breathtaking work, and a foreword by David Staines, who pays homage to Atwood, Pachter, and Moodie and their central places in our art and literature.

Power Politics

Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics first appeared in 1971, startling its audience with its vital dance of woman and man. Thirty years later it still startles, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting Atwood’s poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work.

Selected Poems

Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published Selected Poems, 1965 1975, a volume of selections from Atwood’s poetry of that decade.

Dancing Girls and Other Stories

This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood’s startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. Her men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in different rooms, different houses, or even different worlds. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition and dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.

Bluebeard’s Egg

By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard’s Egg glows with childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women inflict on each other. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mundane lives, and unexpected loves. But here too is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them the intimately personal, the fantastic, the shockingly real…
whether it’s what lives in a mysterious locked room or the secret feelings we all conceal. In this dramatic and far ranging collection, Margaret Atwood proves why she is a true master of the genre.

Murder in the Dark

These short fictions and prose poems are beautifully bizarre: bread can no longer be thought of as wholesome comforting loaves; the pretensions of the male chef are subjected to a loght roasting; a poisonous brew is concocted by cynical five year olds; and knowing when to stop is of deadly importance in a game of Murder in the Dark.

Selected Poems II

Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965 1975, a volume of selections from Atwood’s poetry of that decade.

Wilderness Tips

In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life’s lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery. Richly layered and disturbing, poignant at times and scathingly witty at others, the stories in Wilderness Tips take us into the strange and secret places of the heart and inform the familiar world in which we live with truths that cut to the bone. Margaret Atwood is the author of over twenty five books, including fiction, poetry, and essays. Among her most recent works are the bestselling novels Alias Grace and The Robber Bride and the collections Wilderness Tips and Good Bones and Simple Murders. She lives in Toronto.

Good Bones

These wise and witty writings home in on Shakespeare, tree stumps, ecological disasters, bodies male and female, and theology, amongst other matters. We hear Gertrude’s version of what really happened in Hamlet; an ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves,and a reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong. Good Bones is pure distilled Atwood deliciously strong and bittersweet.

Morning in the Burned House

These beautifully crafted poems by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate make up Margaret Atwood’s most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, ‘ setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word.’ Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

Eating Fire

The evolution of Margaret Atwood’s poetry illuminates one of our major literary talents. Here, as in her novels, is intensity combined with sardonic detachment, and in these early poems her genius for a level stare at the ordinary is wonderfully apparent. Just as startling is her ability to contrast the everyday with the terrifying: ‘Each time I hit a key/ on my electric typewriter/ speaking of peaceful trees/ another village explodes.’ Her poetic voice is crystal clear, insistent, unmistakably her own. Through bus trips and postcards, wilderness and trivia, she reflects the passion and energy of a writer intensely engaged with her craft and the world. Two former collections, Poems 1965 1975 and Poems 1976 1986, are presented together with her latest collection, Morning in the Burned House, in this omnibus that represents the development of a major poet.

The Tent

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 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 mini fictions speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife edge precision.

In pieces ranging in length from a mere paragraph to several pages, Atwood gives a sly pep talk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcerting experience of looking at old photos of ourselves; gives us Horatio’s real views on Hamlet; and examines the boons and banes of orphanhood. Bring Back Mom: An Invocation explores what life was really like for the perfect homemakers of days gone by, and in The Animals Reject Their Names, she runs history backward, with surprising results.

Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, The Tent is vintage Atwood. Enhanced by the author s delightful drawings, it is perfect for Valentine s Day, and any other occasion that demands a special, out of the ordinary gift.

Moral Disorder and Other Stories

Margaret Atwood is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of our time. In Moral Disorder, she has created a series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it those of parents, of siblings, of children, of friends, of enemies, of teachers, and even of animals. As in a photograph album, time is measured in sharp, clearly observed moments. The 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the present all are here. The settings vary: large cities, suburbs, farms, northern forests. The Bad News is set in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. The narrative then switches time as the central character moves through childhood and adolescence in The Art of Cooking and Serving, The Headless Horseman, and My Last Duchess. We follow her into young adulthood in The Other Place and then through a complex relationship, traced in four of the stories: Monopoly, Moral Disorder, White Horse, and The Entities. The last two stories, ‘The Labrador Fiasco’ and ‘The Boys at the Lab,’ deal with the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. As the New York Times has said: ‘The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people’s emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations.

The Door

The Door, Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry since Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. Here in paperback for the first time, these fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to mediative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood’s unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.

The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie

The landmark collaboration of two pre eminent Canadian artists in an attractive, affordable format. As fledgling artists in their respective fields, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter were enthusiastic collaborators in a unique art form, the livre d’artiste the marriage of original graphic work with literary text. Beginning in the mid sixties, while both were still students, they worked together on five limited edition handmade books, volumes of Atwood’s poetry with Pachter’s interpretive artwork. The culmination of their collaboration, the work that is considered their masterpiece, is The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In her reading of Susanna Moodie’s chronicles of pioneer life in nineteenth century Canada, Atwood found the haunting and timeless themes that still obsess us. The poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie were first published in 1970 in a standard format. This sequence of poems is regarded as a classic, in addition to being connected with her later novel, Alias Grace. In 1980, Pachter was able to add his own vibrant, evocative images and create the version they had dreamt of: a hand set, hand printed illustrated limited edition of 120 numbered copies. This popular edition is a faithful re creation of the original, accompanied by an introductory memoir by Pachter, describing his friendship with Atwood and the creative process behind this breathtaking work, and a foreword by David Staines, who pays homage to Atwood, Pachter, and Moodie and their central places in our art and literature.

A Short History of Myth (By:)

Human beings have always been mythmakers. So begins best selling writer Karen Armstrong’s concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the Great Western Transformation of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other. Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world, Armstrong s characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense and explains why if we dismiss it, we do so at our peril.

The Penelopiad

The internationally acclaimed Myths series brings together some of the finest writers of our time to provide a contemporary take on some of our most enduring stories. Here, the timeless and universal tales that reflect and shape our lives mirroring our fears and desires, helping us make sense of the world are revisited, updated, and made new. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is a sharp, brilliant and tender revision of a story at the heart of our culture: the myths about Penelope and Odysseus. In Homer s familiar version, The Odyssey, Penelope is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes to fight in the Trojan Wars, she manages to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son and, in the face of scandalous rumours, keep over a hundred suitors at bay. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters and sleeping with goddesses, he kills Penelope s suitors and curiously twelve of her maids. In Homer the hanging of the maids merits only a fleeting though poignant mention, but Atwood comments in her introduction that she has always been haunted by those deaths. The Penelopiad, she adds, begins with two questions: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? In the book, these subjects are explored by Penelope herself telling the story from Hades the Greek afterworld in wry, sometimes acid tones. But Penelope s maids also figure as a singing and dancing chorus and chorus line, commenting on the action in poems, songs, an anthropology lecture and even a videotaped trial. The Penelopiad does several dazzling things at once. First, it delves into a moment of casual brutality and reveals all that the act contains: a practice of sexual violence and gender prejudice our society has not outgrown. But it is also a daring interrogation of Homer s poem, and its counter narratives which draw on mythic material not used by Homer cleverly unbalance the original. This is the case throughout, from the unsettling questions that drive Penelope s tale forward, to more comic doubts about some of The Odyssey s most famous episodes. Odysseus had been in a fight with a giant one eyed Cyclops, said some; no, it was only a one eyed tavern keeper, said another, and the fight was over non payment of the bill. In fact, The Penelopiad weaves and unweaves the texture of The Odyssey in several searching ways. The Odyssey was originally a set of songs, for example; the new version s ballads and idylls complement and clash with the original. Thinking more about theme, the maids voices add a new and unsettling complex of emotions that is missing from Homer. The Penelopiad takes what was marginal and brings it to the centre, where one can see its full complexity. The same goes for its hero*ine. Penelope is an important figure in our literary culture, but we have seldom heard her speak for herself. Her sometimes scathing comments in The Penelopiad about her cousin, Helen of Troy, for example make us think of Penelope differently and the way she talks about the twenty first century, which she observes from Hades, makes us see ourselves anew too. Margaret Atwood is an astonishing storyteller, and The Penelopiad is, most of all, a haunting and deeply entertaining story. This book plumbs murder and memory, guilt and deceit, in a wise and passionate manner. At time hilarious and at times deeply thought provoking, it is very much a Myth for our times. From the Hardcover edition.

Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (By:Jeanette Winterson)

Canongate Books, together with thirty great international publishing houses, is proud to announce a new series ‘The Myths’. It is backed by an international marketing and PR campaign. The national media partner is already lined up in the UK. Jeanette Winterson will be touring the UK. In ancient Greek mythology Atlas, a member of the original race of gods called Titans, leads a rebellion against the new deities, the Olympians. For this he incurs divine wrath: the victorious Olympians force Atlas, guardian of the Garden of Hesperides and its golden apples of life, to bear the weight of the earth and the heavens for eternity. When the hero Heracles, as one of his famous twelve labours, is tasked with stealing these apples, he seeks out Atlas, offering to shoulder the world temporarily if the Titan will bring him the fruit. Knowing that Heracles is the only person with the strength to take this burden, and enticed by the prospect of even a short lived freedom, Atlas agrees and an uneasy partnership is born. With her typical wit and verve, Jeanette Winterson brings Atlas into the twenty first century. Simultaneously, she asks her own difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, and how we forge our own destiny, Visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to our lives today, Winterson’s skill in turning the familiar on its head and showing us a different truth is once more put to dazzling effect.

Where Three Roads Meet (By:)

In the latest retelling of the world’s greatest stories in theMythseries from Canongate, the highly regarded novelist Salley Vickers brings to life the Western world s most widely known myth,Oedipus, through a shrewdly told exploration of the seminal story in conversation between Freud and Tiresias. It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from the debilitating effects of cancer, has been permitted by the Na*zis to leave Vienna. He seeks refuge in England, taking up residence in the house in Hampstead in which he will die fifteen months later. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger who comes and goes according to Freud s state of health. Who is the mysterious visitor and why has he come to tell the famed proponent of the Oedipus complex his strangely familiar story?Set partly in prewar London and partly in ancient Greece,Where Three Roads Meetis as brilliantly compelling as it is thoughtful. Former psychoanalyst and acclaimed novelist Salley Vickers revisits a crime committed long ago that still has disturbing reverberations for us all today.

Tesseracts (By:Judith Merril)

Each year Tesseract Books chooses a team of editors from among the best of Canada’s writers, publishers and critics to select innovative and futuristic fiction and poetry from the leaders and emerging voices in Canadian speculative fiction. This is the anthology that started it all! Featuring fiction by lisabeth Vonarburg and Hugo and Nebula award winning authors Spider Robinson, and William Gibson.

Tesseracts 3 (With: William Gibson,Charles de Lint,Phyllis Gotlieb,Michael Skeet,Peter Watts,Judith Merril,,,,,,Élisabeth Vonarburg,,,,,,,,Dave Duncan)

In this third anthology of modern Canadian speculative fiction, we present more alternate realities in time and space by new and established Canadian authors. Travel to a planet where the five senses are no good enough…
Watch a baseball game on Mars…
Fly with Garuda, the king of birds, to see what kind of human folly he can find to amuse the gods…
Visit a laundromat that can take you anywhere in space and time…
Stroll through a holograph of the last forest on earth…
See how time will end, with a jolt or a gradual slide…
Includes authors such as: Margaret Atwood, Charles DeLint, Elizabeth Vonarburg, Phyllis Gotlieb, Dave Duncan, William Gibson and others.

Tesseracts 4 (By:Michael Skeet,Lorna Toolis)

Tesseracts 4 expands futures in specualtive and science fiction as we present our latest anthology of new and established Canadian writers.

Enter worlds where reproductive laws yield a biotechnical marriage of the flesh…
take the stage with a rock ‘n’ roll band, it’s fame, fortune and phantom…
prepare for the gift of flight on eagles’ wings…
experience the angst of a mother as she searches for her abducted dream child on video…
hand raise a mystical beast in the comfort of your own home…
go behind a freakshow cage to meet a philosophical man faced dog…
charge a truly animalistic sexuality to your credit card…

Includes authors such as: Candas Jane Dorsey, Dave Duncan, Ursula Pflug, Tom Henighan Phyllis Gotlieb, Charles DeLint, Elisabeth Vonarburg and others.

Tesseracts 5 (By:Yves Meynard,Robert Runté)

Every year two new editors choose the best new writing from Canada’s new and established SF writers, from all over the country and from both the anglophone and francophone traditions. This 1996 anthology of Canadian speculative writing contains writing by Candas Jane Dorsey, Jan Lars Jensen, Michael Coney, James Alan Gardner, John Park, Natasha Beaulieu and others.

Tesseracts 7 (By:David Annandale,Michael Skeet,,Cory Doctorow,,,Yves Meynard,,,Shirley Meier,Carolyn Clink,,Élisabeth Vonarburg)

Readers will find both familiar and new authors in this seventh volume of speculative fiction and poetry showcasing the very best in Canadian literature including French Canadian authors whose works are translated into English, as well as a special international Spanish translation. Tesseracts7 includes top talents such as: Candas Jane Dorsey, Bob Boyczuk, Cory Doctorow, Jan Lars Jensen, Teresa Plowright, Yves Meynard, Michael Skeet, Mildred Trembley, lisabeth Vonarburg, and Gerry Truscott.

Tesseracts 8 (By:Cory Doctorow,,A.M. Dellamonica,,,Yves Meynard,,,,Sandra Kasturi)

Tesseracts8 brings together twenty of the best pieces of Canadian speculative fiction, selected from both established and new, English and French writers by award winning editors John Clute and Candas Jane Dorsey.

Readers of all types of speculative fiction science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and horror will find their flavor in the eighth anthology in the renowned Tesseracts series.

TesseractsQ (By:Élisabeth Vonarburg,Jane Brierley)

Six years in the making, this massive volume brings together the best speculative writing by Quebec authors over the last twenty years, superbly translated into English to reach new readers.

Includes writing by authors such as: Yves Meynard, Jean Pierre April, Bertrand Bergeron, Jean Dion, Jane Brierley, Elisabeth Vonarburg and others.

Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction (By:,Nalo Hopkinson)

Tesseracts Nine also made the LOCUS Recommended reading list for 2006.

It was included in the Locus Poll for best anthology!

Many of the stories have now appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies.

While other stories received nominations for the Brandon, Fountain, Sturgeon and Aurora Awards.

‘Apparently being in T9 was a Good Thing.’

Derryl Murphy
Each year Tesseract Books chooses a team of editors from amongst the best of Canada’s writers, publishers and critics to select innovative and futuristic fiction and poetry from the leaders and emerging voices in Canadian speculative fiction.

Tesseracts Nine expands the dimensions of speculative fiction experientially, with startling visions of the future by new and established Canadian authors.

Featuring twenty three stories and poems by: Timothy J. Anderson, Sylvie B rard, Ren Beaulieu, E. L. Chen, Candas Jane Dorsey, Pat Forde, Marg Gilks, Sandra Kasturi, Nancy Kilpatrick, Claude Lalumi re, Anthony MacDonald, Jason Mehmel, Yves Meynard, Derryl Murphy, Rhea Rose, Dan Rubin, Daniel Sernine, Steve Stanton, Jerome Stueart, Sarah Totton, lisabeth Vonarburg, Peter Watts, Allan Weiss, Alette J. Willis and Casey June Wolf.

Edited by Sunburst and World Fantasy Award winning authors Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman, Tesseracts Nine showcases the very best in Canadian speculative fiction literature including English translations of works by French Canadian authors.

Tesseracts Ten (By:Edo Van Belkom)

20 Stunning Canadian SF short stories and poems to shock, twist and kindle your imagination…
What makes Tesseracts Ten special…
Every story/poem is diverse and distinctive, ranging from futuristic hard core science fiction to alternative history…
Stories hand picked by award winning editors Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom. Powerful new works by both well known and new Canadian speculative fiction writers. Many of the authors have won awards for previous works. Part of a long lineage of Tesseracts speculative fiction collections. Following Tesseracts Nine, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Taylor which won the Aurora award for best works other. What do Parisian buttons, nesting spiders, and men from Venus have in common? They are all part of Tesseracts Ten the sparkling new addition to the 21 year old Tesseracts Collection. Tesseracts Ten joins volumes One through Nine, and Tesseracts Q forming an eleven volume anthology of Canada’s best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Literature. Following the Tesseracts tradition of having different editors for each collection, Tesseracts Ten was compiled by two of the world’s finest speculative fiction writers.

Tesseracts Eleven (By:,Cory Doctorow)

Twenty four of the best new stories and poems by neophyte and established Canadian science fiction authors are presented in this seminal anthology which has entered its third decade of existence. Edited by award winning authors Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips, Tesseracts Eleven showcases the very best in Canadian speculative fiction literature including English translations of works by French Canadian authors that has been written in the new millennium.

Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction (By:Michael Skeet)

Tesseracts Twelve is unlike any other volume in this critically acclaimed series showcasing the best in Canadian speculative fiction. For the first time in its distinguished history, Tesseracts focuses on novellas, the form believed by many to be the best expression of fantastic and speculative storytelling.

In Tesseracts Twelve, the series’ most ambitious volume to date, celebrated writer, anthologist, and critic Claude Lalumi re has gathered seven brand new novellas from some of Canada’s finest writers of fantastic fiction.

Follow these daring, imaginative, and entertaining writers into new worlds of wonder, with an outlook that is both Canadian and global.

Cavemen and woolly mammoths invade Yukon! Mythological creatures cause havoc in ancient feudal Japan! Women with power over love and death stalk the streets of Montreal! A modern Scheherazade seeks to understand love in a Toronto suffused with magic and fable! A small town in Alberta is rife with pagan rituals! Superheroes tackle Korean politics, maniacal supervillains, and corporate downsizing! As the world faces environmental collapse, reality TV adventurers battle giant beasts from the ocean depths!

Tesseracts Twelve features all new exciting and imaginative work by:

  • E.L. Chen,
  • Randy McCharles,
  • Derryl Murphy,
  • David Nickle,
  • Gord Sellar,
  • Grace Seybold, and
  • Michael Skeet & Jill Snider Lum;
  • and introduction by Brett Alexander Savory.

Tesseracts Thirteen (By:Nancy Kilpatrick)

Tesseracts Thirteen invites you to delve into literature’s shadowy side!

This, the newest and most unusual of the popular and award winning Tesseracts anthologies, utilizes the mysterious and bewitching number ‘thirteen’ to explore a new realm of innovative, thought provoking and disturbing fiction. Award winning authors and editors Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell have unearthed twenty three stories of horror and dark fantasy that reflect a m lange of Canada’s most exciting known and about to be known writers. These eerie genre tales range from the unsettling to the sinister. Inside you will find stories featuring:

The young, but not always innocent ghosts; multiple births; comic book characters come to life

Romance gone terribly wrong curses; mournful spirits; bringing back the dead

Creepy and twisted realities mummies; windigos; post apocalyptic Canada

The authors in Tesseracts 13 span the country, from east to west coast, applying a particularly Canadian stamp to a classic and revered genre. Contributors include: Kelley Armstrong; Alison Baird; Rebecca Bradley; Mary E. Choo; Suzanne Church; Kevin Co*ckle; Ivan Dorin; Katie Harse; Kevin Kvas; Michael Kelly; Jill Snider Lum; Catherine MacLeod; Matthew Moore; Silvia Moreno Garcia; David Nickle; Jason Ridler; Gord Rollo; Andrea Schlecht; Daniel Sernine; Stephanie Short; Jean Louis Trudel; Edo van Belkom; Bev Vincent

Expert in the field Robert Knowlton provides a fascinating and detailed overview of the history of horror and dark fantasy writing and publishing in Canada.

Tesseracts 14: Strange Canadian Stories (By:)

This unique collection of short stories features the work of some of Canada’s finest speculative fiction writers. Included in this collection are short stories and poems by: Michelle Barker, Tony Burgess, Suzanne Church, David Clink, Michael Colangelo, Margaret Curelas, Susan Forest, L.L. Hannett, Brent Hayward, Patrick Johanneson, Sandra Kasturi, Claude Lalumiere, Michael Lorenson, Catherine MacLeod, Matthew Moore, David Nickle, John Park, Jonathan Saville, Robert J. Sawyer, Daniel Sernine, Leah Silverman, Jerome Stueart and Jon Martin Watts.

The Best American Short Stories 1981

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Louis D. Rubin, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Tallent, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1983

Short Stories by Ann Tyler, Bill Barich, John Updike, Carolyn Chute, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the Amer ican short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such c lassic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest,’ Raymond Carve r’s ‘Cathedral,’ and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents. Hardcover edition also available. Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Short Stories 1993

The preeminent annual collection of short fiction features the writing of John Updike, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry, Diane Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dixon, and Mary Gaitskill.

The Best American Short Stories 1994

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1995

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1996

Each fall, The Best American Short Stories provides a fresh showcase for this rich and unpredictable genre. Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, the choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and an array of stunning new talent.

The Best American Short Stories 1997

The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx’s selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Junot D’az, and T. C. Boyle as well as an array of stunning new talent. In her introduction, Proulx writes that beyond their strength and vigor, these stories achieve ‘a certain intangible feel for the depth of human experience, not uncommonly expressed through a kind of dry humor.’ As ever, this year’s volume surprises and rewards.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

Edited by beloved storyteller Garrison Keillor, this year’s volume promises to be full of humor, surprises, and, as always, accomplished writing by new and familiar voices. The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling author.

The Best American Short Stories 1999

‘What I look for most in a story,’ writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, ‘what I crave, what I found in these twenty one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell.’ Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,’ by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy’s haunting story ‘The Uncharted Heart,’ a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. ‘Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before,’ writes Tan. ‘I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself.’ With twenty one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories 2000

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor always a preeminent master of the form THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, ‘Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller…
who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character’s and the writer’s own.’ Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content When a great annual collection comes out, it’s hard to know the reason why. Was there a bumper crop of high quality stories, or was this year’s guest editor especially gifted at winnowing out the good ones? Either way, the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories is a standout in a series that can be uneven. Its editor, E.L. Doctorow, seems to have a fondness for the ‘what if?’ story, the kind of tale that posits an imagination prodding question and then attempts to answer it. Nathan Englander’s ‘The Gilgul of Park Avenue’ asks: What if a WASPy financial analyst, riding in a cab one day, discovers to his surprise that he is irrevocably Jewish? In ‘The Ordinary Son,’ Ron Carlson asks: What if you are the only average person in a family of certifiable geniuses? And Allan Gurganus’s ‘He’s at the Office’ asks: What if the quintessential postwar American working man were forced to retire? This last story is narrated by the man’s grown son, who at the story’s opening takes his dad for a walk. Though it’s the present day, the father is still dressed in his full 1950s businessman regalia, including camel hair overcoat and felt hat. The two walk by a teenager. ‘The boy smiled. ‘Way bad look on you, guy.”

My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was ‘I think he likes you.’

The exchange typifies the writing showcased in this anthology: in these stories, again and again, we find a breakdown of human communication that is sprightly, humorous, and devastatingly complete. A few more of the terrific stories featured herein: Amy Bloom’s ‘The Story,’ a goofy metafiction about a villainous divorcee; Geoffrey Becker’s ‘Black Elvis,’ which tells of, well, a black Elvis; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ a story of an Indian man who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the collection itself, Lahiri’s story amas*ses a lovely, funny mood as it goes along. Claire Dederer

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Since the series’ inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best fifty five extraordinary stories that represent a century’s worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike’s contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959, to his most recent, in 1998. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

The Best American Short Stories 2002

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

This year’s Best American Short Stories features a rich mix of voices, from both intriguing new writers and established masters of the form like Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arthur Miller. The 2002 collection includes stories about everything from illicit love affairs to family, the immigrant experience and badly behaved children stories varied in subject but unified in their power and humanity. In the words of this year’s guest editor, the best selling author Sue Miller, ‘The American short story today is healthy and strong…
These stories arrived in the nick of time…
to teach me once more what we read fiction for.’

The Best American Short Stories 2003

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 2004

Story for story, readers can’t beat The Best American Short Stories series…
Each year it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story’ Chicago Tribune. This year’s most beloved short fiction anthology is edited by the best selling novelist Sue Miller, author of While I Was Gone, and, most recently, The World Below. The volume includes stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jill McCorkle, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, and Akhil Sharma, among others. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content In her opening remarks to The Best American Short Stories 2002, guest editor Sue Miller notes the difficulty of reading fiction produced during 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She also remarks that by the time she had finalized her 20 selections, this act of reading had restored her faith both in fiction’s significance and its ability to tap into timeless themes. The 2002 anthology includes stories best described as realist fiction or traditional fiction, many set in contemporary times. The tales range from E.L. Doctorow’s ‘A House on the Plains,’ a murder set at the turn of the century, to pieces with more recent settings, like ‘Puppy’ by Richard Ford, which shows how a New Orleans couple deals or doesn’t deal with the appearance of a stray dog. Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Nobody’s Business’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Seven’ deftly portray the disconnection a semi assimilated Indian American and Haitian American couple experience both as partners and as U.S. citizens. Leonard Michael’s ‘Nachman from Los Angeles,’ in contrast, adds some levity to the mix. Miller adds in her preface that maybe next year the tales will depart further from tradition, but judging from this volume no departure is necessary: the selections take the reader on a delightful journey through some of America’s best contemporary writers. Jane Hodges

The Best American Short Stories 2005

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane Tom Perrotta Alice Munro Edward P. Jones Joy Williams Joyce Carol Oates Thomas McGuane Kelly Link Charles D’Ambrosio Cory Doctorow George Saunders and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

The Best American Short Stories 2006

While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about, writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.

This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In The View from Castle Rock, the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander s cast of young characters in How We Avenged the Blums confronts a bully dubbed The Anti Semite to both comic and tragic ends. In Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart wrenching look at a young man s choices when his father along with most of the men in his small town is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li s After a Life reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in Tatooizm, Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple s relationship that has run its course.

Ann Patchett brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness to The Best American Short Stories 2006 , writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, and she is, surely, every story writer s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

In his introduction to this volume, Stephen King writes, Talent does more than come out; it bursts out, again and again, doing exuberant cartwheels while the band plays ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’…
Talent can t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. In fact, that’s its job. Wonderfully eclectic, The Best American Short Stories 2007 collects stories by writers of undeniable talent, both newcomers and favorites. These stories examine the turning points in life when we, as children or parents, lovers or friends or colleagues, must break certain rules in order to remain true to ourselves. In T. C. Boyle s heartbreaking Balto, a thirteen year old girl provides devastating courtroom testimony in her father s trial. Aryn Kyle s charming story Allegiance shows a young girl caught between her despairing British mother and motherly American father. In The Bris, Eileen Pollack brilliantly writes of a son struggling to fulfill his filial obligations, even when they require a breach of morality and religion. Kate Walbert s stunning Do Something portrays one mother s impassioned and revolutionary refusal to accept her son s death. And in Richard Russo s graceful Horseman, an English professor comes to understand that plagiarism reveals more about a student than original work can. New series editor Heidi Pitlor writes, Stephen King s dedication, unflagging hard work, and enthusiasm for excellent writing shone through on nearly a daily basis this past year…
We agreed, disagreed, and in the end very much concurred on the merit of the twenty stories chosen. The result is a vibrant assortment of stories and voices brim*ming with attitude, deep wisdom, and rare compassion.

The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 1890 1941 was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains 1917 and The Forgotten Threshold 1918.

The Best American Short Stories 2008

This brilliant collection, edited by the award winning and perennially provocative Salman Rushdie, boasts a magnificent array Library Journal of voices both new and recognized. With Rushdie at the helm, the 2008 edition reflects the variety of substance and style and the consistent quality that readers have come to expect Publishers Weekly. We all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are. The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself. Salman Rushdie, editorThe Best American Short Stories 2008 includes KEVIN BROCKMEIER ALLEGRA GOODMAN A. M. HOMES NICOLE KRAUSS JONATHAN LETHEM STEVEN MILLHAUSER DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ALICE MUNRO GEORGE SAUNDERS TOBIAS WOLFF and others

The Best American Short Stories 2009

Edited by critically acclaimed, best selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year’s collection serve as a provacative literary ‘antenna for what is going on in the world’ Chicago Tribune. The collection boasts great variety from ‘famous to first timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds’ St. Louis Post Dispatch, ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best selling Best American.

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by the award winning, best selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative Wall Street Journal. With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America s oldest and best selling story anthology is sure to be of enduring quality Chicago Tribune this year.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

With a New AfterwordAs a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

Crimespotting

All the short stories in ‘Crimespotting‘ are brand new and specially commissioned. The brief was deceptively simple – each story must be set in Edinburgh and feature a crime. The results range from hard-boiled police procedural to historical whodunit and from the wildly comic to the spookily supernatural.

I’m With the Bears

A stellar line up of fiction writers envision the terrors of impending climate change. The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists are liable to live in a state of denial. The award winning writers collected here have made it their task to shake off this nagging disbelief, bringing the incomprehensible within our grasp and shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our global habitat. From T. C. Boyle’s account of early eco activists, to Nathaniel Rich s vision of a near future where oil sells for $800 a barrel these ten provocative, occasionally chilling, sometimes satirical stories bring a human reality to disasters of inhuman proportions. Royalties from I m With the Bears will go to 350. org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers

Audio CD, Highbridge Audio and Blackstone Publishing

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