Margaret Atwood returns to short fiction with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace.

A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in “Alphinland,” the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists.

In “The Freeze-Dried Bridegroom,” a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise.

In “Lusus Naturae,” a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire.

In “Torching the Dusties,” an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence.

And in “Stone Mattress,” a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite.

In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

• Short-listed, Trillium Book Award
• Short-listed, Toronto Book Award
• Short-listed, Arthur Ellis Award

"Realism and ridiculousness, play and deadly seriousness, are held in fine balance throughout. . . . Atwood's prose is sharp and sly." —The Guardian

"Terrific. . . . Atwood's narrative control, her ability to surprise and her sparkling language are on full display." —Globe and Mail

"Atwood, more than 40 books into her career, has arrived here preoccupied not just with the churn of generations but also with legacy and reputation, with getting straight the story of one's life—the tale about the tale—and with surviving what happens once no one is paying any attention anymore. . . . Witty and frequently biting." —New York Times
"She shuns predictability, and writes with a light hand and a dry wit. . . . Enjoy!" —Ursula K. Le Guin, Financial Times

"Her storytelling skills remain at the level of a master. These are wonderfully gripping tales: they hold us tight from the first word to the last." —Quill & Quire

"With Stone Mattress, Atwood brilliantly returns to her literary roots as a deliciously funny observer of the human comedy." —Toronto Star