Margaret Atwood Archive

Author Worship

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The Canadian literary scene has been tumultuous lately, following Stephen Galloway’s dismissal from UBC following allegations of sexual assault.

Writ in Water: Reservation Round

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In a space like this, when we talk about genre fiction, we are often talking about its limitations: its conventions, its shallowness, its easy accessibility, its (overly) familiar repetitions, its elastic distance behind the invisible but razor-wired line of the literary.

Launching

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Today, my first book launches. It’s kind of a wonderful word, launch: such propulsive force in its sound. Such muscular, fearless leaping. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d take a look at launchings of various kinds in literature. Not gradual beginnings, not slow evolutions into different forms, but sudden

Cultural Lifelines and Individual Artistry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst

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In 1999, Robert Bringhurst—polyglot translator, poet, and typographic authority—published A Story as Sharp as a Knife, a book about Haida myths and mythtellers. Bringhurst retranslates the work of several Haida poets using century-old transcriptions from anthropologist John Swanton.

Crafting A Novelscape

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In the words of my own personal goddess of literature, Joyce Carol Oates, one should “…never underestimate the power­­—benevolent, malevolent, profound and irresistible— of place.” These words make my heart keen.

Round-Up: Chicago Public Library Giveaway, the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize, and Gregory Rabassa

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From the Chicago Public Library's children's book giveaway to the passing of a central figure in Latin American writing, here's some of last week's most important literary news: Writer and activist Margaret Atwood was awarded with the 2016 PEN Pinter prize.

Round-Down: The Hogarth Series Will Reinvent Shakespeare’s Works As Novels

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Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Gap of Time, released only one week ago, is the first book launched of a larger series, called The Hogarth Shakespeare. The series, from the revered Vintage Books, plans to do the very exciting and almost unthinkable: reimagine Shakespeare’s classic plays as novels penned by

Five Speculative Tales Still Relevant Today (And What They Can Teach Us)

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Seven-Word Summary: Women enslaved by tyrannical dicks with dicks. Excerpt: “Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death.

We Have Something to Say

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Inside most classrooms lives a beast, many-eyed. If you’ve been a student in a classroom, especially in those early grades when a year lasts an eon, you’ve been part of this beast. You saw your elementary-school teachers with a collective, sharpened vision (their combovers, fluffy perms, paunches, thick, magnifying

Social Media and Literature

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I seem a little less in love with literature because of social media. My apologies to the Ploughshares staff who have to Tweet about this post, but it’s true. For a few months I was an intern for an online literary magazine, helping with their social media. I’d done