Burning Questions

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid s Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola and seeks answers to Burning Questions such as...

 Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and Atwood's other beloved works.
 How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
 How can we live on our planet?
 Is it true? And is it fair?
 What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood s views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.

Introduction
 
Part I: 2004 to 2009 | What Will Happen Next?
Scientific Romancing
Frozen in Time
From Eve to Dawn
Polonia
Somebody s Daughter
Five Visits to the Word-Hoard
The Echo Maker
Wetlands
Trees of Life, Trees of Death
Ryszard Kapu ci ski
Anne of Green Gables
Alice Munro: An Appreciation
Ancient Balances
Scrooge
A Writing Life
 
Part II: 2010 to 2013 | Art Is Our Nature
The Writer as Political Agent? Really?
Literature and the Environment
Alice Munro
The Gift
Bring Up the Bodies
Rachel Carson Anniversary
The Futures Market
Why I Wrote Maddaddam
Seven Gothic Tales
Doctor Sleep
Doris Lessing
How to Change the World?
 
Part III: 2014 to 2016 | Which Is to Be Master
In Translationland
On Beauty
The Summer of the Stromatolites
Kafka
Future Library
Reflections on The Handmaid s Tale
We Are Double-Plus Unfree
Buttons or Bows?
Gabrielle Roy
Shakespeare and Me
Marie-Claire Blais
Kiss of the Fur Queen
We Hang by a Thread
 
Part IV: 2017 To 2019 | How Slippery Is the Slope?
What Art Under Trump?
The Illustrated Man
Am I A Bad Feminist?
We Lost Ursula Le Guin When We Needed Her Most
Three Tarot Cards
A Slave State?
Oryx and Crake
Greetings, Earthlings! What Are These Human Rights of Which You Speak?
Payback
Memory of Fire
Tell. The. Truth.
 
Part V: 2020 to 2021 | Thought and Memory
Growing Up in Quarantineland
The Equivalents
Inseparable
We
The Writing of The Testaments
The Bedside Book of Birds
Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death
Caught in Time s Current
Big Science
Barry Lopez
The Sea Trilogy
 
 
Acknowledgements
Credits
Index