Atwood Book Quotes

Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

Here is a book of tongues. Take it. (Dark leaves invade the air.) Beware! I now know a language so beautiful and lethal My mouth bleeds when I speak it.

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

I thought, men who changed their names were likely to be con-men, criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

But mostly she likes the fact that there's a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.

Then she let him lick her fingers for her. He ran his tongue around the small ovals of her nails. This was the closest she could get to him without becoming food: she was in him, or part of her was in part of him. Sex was the other way around: While that was going on, he was in her. I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.

I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary. “They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress.

Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?

Now maybe I wouldn't do it, but I was a child then," said Oryx more softly. "Why are you so angry?" "I don't buy it," said Jimmy. Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up? "You don't buy what?" "Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap." "If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy," said Oryx, looking at him tenderly, "what is it that you would like to buy instead?" (167)

all around the walls there are bookcases. They're filled with books. Books and books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can't come in here. It's an oasis of the forbidden.

gazing down at the black water remembering all the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They'd done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it- in love- you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.

They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away, computers could be destroyed. Only the spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn't a thing.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

It was a problem in comic books: drawing an invisible man.

So, the book is not 'anti-religion.' It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.

Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens ["Strange New World," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/boo...].

... because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, grabbed hold of you before you know it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it - in love - you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

It’s literature. It’s all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it’s a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that’s all I ask. Make me believe.

If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.

Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

We miss you, Mom, though you were reviled to great profit in magazines and books for ruining your children – that would be us – by not loving them enough, by loving them too much, by wanting too much love from them, by some failure of love –

Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered—at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power—an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves. We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours. After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me. I liked the feel of them, and the look. Luke said I had the mind of an antiquarian. He liked that, he liked old things himself. It’s

Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals.

Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear,” and

It’s an old debate. Should art be good art, or art that’s good for you? Once the question gets raised, next thing you know they’re banning books in libraries.

Orphans are such flirts, they'll hook up with anyone, then they tear up their phone books, they discard at random. They show no mercy.

my mother said that books were decorations, like vases of flowers.

My mother said that books were like decorations, like vases of flowers.

It is important, says the book in his head, to ignore minor irritants, to avoid pointless repinings, and to turn one’s mental energies to immediate realities and to the tasks at hand

Once you've published a book you are often asked why you did it- as if you've stolen an ashtray- and you will find me, in one of these essays, dutifully trying to account for my crime.

Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. This is what the Gardeners taught us, when I was a child among them. They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing. As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you.

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

They look, I said. They look in all our rooms. What for? he said. I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said, Books, writing, black market stuff. All things we aren't supposed to have.

I reached the privy and emptied the slop pail, and so forth. And so forth, Grace? asks Dr.Jordan. I look at him. Really if he does not know what you do in a privy there is no hope for him. What I did was, I hoisted my skirts and sat down above the buzzing flies, on the same seat everyone in the house sat on, lady or lady's maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilac neither, as Mary Whitney used to say. What was in there for wiping was an old copy of the Godey's Ladies' Book; I always looked at the pictures before using them. Most were of the latest fashions, but some were of duchesses from England and high-society ladies in New York and the like. You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control. But I do not say any of this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him.

That is the “real” reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We hear the voice of a book speaking to us.

In any case, that book snagged his first-ever prize. He’d pretended to view it with indifference, even disdain – what were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment? – but he’d cashed the cheque.

Romance comic books, on the cover always a pink face oozing tears like a melting popsicle; men’s magazines were about pleasure, cars and women, the skins bald as inner tubes. In a way it was a relief, to be exempt from feeling.

But all around the walls there are bookcases. They're filled with books. Books and books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can't come in here. It's an oasis of the forbidden. I try not to stare.

Photo album, I’m in it somewhere, successive incarnations of me preserved and flattened like flowers pressed in dictionaries; that was the other book she kept, the leather album, a logbook like the diaries. I used to hate standing still, waiting for the click.

He’d snared a summer job at the Martha Graham library, going through old books and earmarking them for destruction while deciding which should remain on earth in digital form, but he lost this post halfway through its term because he couldn’t bear to throw anything out.

I want happiness, guaranteed, joy all round, covers with nurses on them or brides, intelligent girls but not too intelligent, with regular teeth and pluck and both breasts the same size and no excess facial hair, someone you can depend on to know where the bandages are and to turn the hero, that potential rake and killer, into a well-groomed country gentleman with clean fingernails and the right vocabulary. Always, he has to say. Forever. I no longer want to read books that don’t end with the word forever. I want to be stroked between the eyes, one way only.

Once there was nothing she wouldn’t do to render herself alluring. So many items attached to her head: ribbons and ships, all curling. Now her torso lies in the ditch like a lost glove, like a tossed book mostly unsaid. Unread. In the high palace of words, one princess the less.

I know it is the Book of Job, before Job gets the boils and running sores, and the whirlwinds. It's what Satan says to God. He must mean that he has come to test me, although he's too late for that, as God has done a great deal of testing of me already, and you would think he would be tired of it by now.

A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes its own interpreter.

One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil.

; probably it’s Mr. Percival the publisher, he’s a cautious man, he shies away from anything he calls “disturbing.” We had an argument about that: he said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened. “It isn’t the children who buy the books,” he said, “it’s their parents.

I didn't want any phase of my life to be gone forever, to be over and done with. I preferred beginnings to endings in books, as well - it was exciting not to know what was lying in store for me on the unread pages - but, perversely, I couldn't resist sneaking a look at the final chapter of any book I was reading.

I tried to read Handmaid's tale, really I did, but every time I opened the book, I recalled the movie from 199 all too vividly. I threw up then and unfortunately, that brought back memories of my time in the middle east with the Marine Corp , where I witnessed the murders, rapes and brutality. I can't forget the screams. David Larkin.

Rosalind Porter: As a writer, how important do you feel it is to engage with the digital revolution? Margaret Atwood: I don’t think it’s important. If I do it, it’s because of my insatiable curiosity. But people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to have a blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don’t. I would say that having done it, the blogging and Tweeting and so forth reaches possibly a different kind of reader than the kind you may have been used to hearing from. But an author’s job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea, and that’s the same for any method of dissemination. There’s still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don’t understand it – who don’t like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do, and the process is still a scattergun approach.

It’s here,” says Felix, rooting through his playbook. “He says, ‘Let me not dwell / In this bare island by your spell.’ Prospero has undone his charms and is about to break his magic staff and drown his book, so he can’t perform any more magic. The spell is now controlled by the audience, he says: unless they vote the play a success by clapping and cheering, Prospero will stay imprisoned on the island.

They will be plotting a strategy for recapture; or will they really go off and discard me, vanish into the catacombs of the city, giving me up for lost, stashing me away in their heads with all the obsolete costumes and phrases? For them I’ll soon be ancient as crew cuts and World War songs, a half-remembered face in a high-school year book, a captured enemy medal: memorabilia, or possibly not even that.

Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. This is what the Gardener’s taught us, when I was a child among them. They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing.

The Second World War created the need for a new generation of female heroes. Where could these women look for role models? The women of the previous war had by this time been largely forgotten. Although efforts had been made during the 1920s to memorialize the war's heroes, both men and women, with monuments, books, and films, most Europeans, impatient to forget the war, also forgot its heroes. But now the memory of their courage was needed and eagerly recalled...

electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that’s jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone’s been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It’s no joke, he tells the viewers. Don’t think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bond-drive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child’s pink nap blanket. A gelid baby

No hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or, no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb.

– I began to wander around by myself. I would march along by the riverbank, trying to pretend I had a destination, or stand on the Jubilee Bridge as if waiting for someone, gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it – in love – you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

For whom does the writer write? The question poses itself most simply in the case of the diary-writer or journal-keeper. Only very occasionally is the answer specifically no one, but this is a misdirection, because we couldn't hear it unless a writer had put it in a book and published it for us to read. Here for instance is diary-writer Doctor Glas, from Hjalmar Soderberg's astonishing 1905 Swedish novel of the same name: Now I sit at my open window, writing - for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself, even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour.

Jesus sits at the right hand of God,” she said, “so who sits at God’s left hand?” “Maybe God doesn’t have a left hand,” I said, to tease her. “Left hands are supposed to be bad, so maybe he wouldn’t have one. Or maybe he got his left hand cut off in a war.” “We’re made in God’s image,” Laura said, “and we have left hands, so God must have one as well.” She consulted her diagram, chewing on the end of her pencil. “I know!” she said. “The table must be circular! So everyone sits at everyone else’s right hand, all the way round.” “And vice versa,” I said. Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It’s a left-handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.

When I was a young person reading whatever I could get my hands on, I came across some old books of my fathers, in a series called Everyman's Library. The endpapers of that date were a sort of William Morris design, with leaves and flowers and a lady in graceful medieval draperies carrying a scroll and a branch with three apples or other spherical fruit on it. Interwoven among the shrubbery there was a motto: 'Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.' This was very reassuring to me. The books were declaring that they were my pals; they promised to accompany me on my travels; and they would not only offer me some helpful hints, they'd be right there by my side whenever I really needed them. It's always nice to have someone you can depend on.

What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is. It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist. We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not. -- Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment and criticism. -- Novels are not political tracts, although "politics" -- in the sense of human power structures -- is inevitably one of their subjects. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel. As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written." -- Novels are not how-to books; they will not show you how to conduct a successful life, although some of them may be read this way. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Partly. But not completely. -- Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts. Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters. However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in. -- But although a novel is not a political tract, a how-to-book, a sociology textbook or a pattern of correct morality, it is also not merely a piece of Art for Art's Sake, divorced from real life. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials. -- In short, novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they're perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery -- namely, language itself.

He would place his mouth, still full of sleep, on hers, and perhaps pull her back into the bedroom and down into the bed with him, into that liquid pool of flesh, his mouth sliding over her, furry pleasure, the covers closing over them as they sank into weightlessness. But he hadn't done that for some time. He had been waking earlier and earlier; she, on the other hand, had been having trouble getting out of bed. She was losing that compulsion, that joy, whatever had nagged her out into the cold morning air, driven her to fill all those notebooks, all those printed pages. Instead, she would roll herself up in the blankets after Bernie got up, tucking in all the corners, muffling herself in wool. She had begun to have the feeling that nothing was waiting for her outside the bed's edge. No emptiness but nothing, the zero with legs in the arithmetic book. 'I'm off,' he'd say to her groggy bundled back. She'd be awake enough to hear this; then she would lapse back into a humid sleep. His absence was one more reason for not getting up.

Me, and Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie, too, must have been up late. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything as lax and unguarded as sleeping. Her eyes – not sarcastic eyes, I now realized, but merry eyes, the eyes of an elderly child, crinkled at the corners as if she were suppressing a joke or a quaint piece of wisdom – surely those eyes of hers never closed. Perhaps she was the one responsible for choosing our required reading material – she, and a group of others like her, all of a certain age, all with excellent suits, all with real stones in their lapel brooches, all with qualifications. They got together, they had secret meetings, they conferred, they cooked up our book list among them. They knew something we needed to know, but it was a complicated thing – not so much a thing as a pattern, like the clues in a detective story once you started connecting them together. These women – these teachers – had no direct method of conveying this thing to us, not in a way that would make us listen, because it was too tangled, it was too oblique. It was hidden within the stories.

It didn’t take me very much reading and skimming to discover that Tess had serious problems – much worse than mine. The most important thing in her life happened to her in the very first part of the book. She got taken advantage of, at night, in the woods, because she’d stupidly accepted a drive home with a jerk, and after that it was all downhill, one awful thing after another, turnips, dead babies, getting dumped by the man she loved, and then her tragic death at the end. (I peeked at the last three chapters.) Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia – we’d studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren’t up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help. Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time

A box of dominoes, a deck of cards, those were under the folded blankets. There are a lot of paperbacks on the shelves in the bedrooms, detective novels mostly, recreational reading. Beside them are the technical books on trees and the other reference books, Edible Plants and Shoots, Tying the Dry Fly, The Common Mushrooms, Log Cabin Construction, A Field Guide to the Birds, Exploring Your Camera, he believed that with the proper guidebooks you could do everything yourself; and his cache of serious books: the King James Bible which he said he enjoyed for its literary qualities, a complete Robert Burns, Boswell’s Life, Thompson’s Seasons, selections from Goldsmith and Cowper. He admired what he called the eighteenth-century rationalists: he thought of them as men who had avoided the corruptions of the Industrial Revolution and learned the secret of the golden mean, the balanced life, he was sure they all practiced organic farming. It astounded me to discover much later, in fact my husband told me, that Burns was an alcoholic, Cowper a madman, Dr. Johnson a manic-depressive and Goldsmith a pauper. There was something wrong with Thompson also; “escapist” was the term he used. After that I liked them better, they weren’t paragons any more.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would like to be able to write such sentences, without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If I could only do these two simple things, I feel, I would be able to pass my allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet. She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot read a body like a gazelle’s without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos and smells. She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. He’s about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot, devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I can’t concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic frisson quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an over-ripe peach, and not to be able to swallow, or wallow. Which one? I murmur to the unresponding air. Which one?

YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafés, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relationships, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel. Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it’s what he said to him, or didn’t say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the bastard up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the passageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes shining like digital wristwatches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!

The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. by Jill Lepore In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

books set in northern California. Annie obliged with titles by Elizabeth Atwood Taylor, Susan Dunlap, Janet LaPierre, Janet Dawson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Shelley Singer, Marcia Muller and Linda Grant.

He found the letter she’d written to a lover she imagined when she was pregnant and reading Margaret Atwood. There was no limit to the Atwood she read in bed. She said the letter wasn’t written to anyone that existed and if he’d read these books about pregnancy he would know it was common for lovers to appear and disappear during periods of prolonged bedrest. He wanted to know why she was laughing. What was funny? Was this her version of pop culture? And why did the pillowcase she embroidered for him suddenly look like a parody? She said it was normal to doubt your spouse when you found a suspicious letter but only if you were already prone to suspicious mindsets and revisionist thinking. A serious man wouldn’t take this seriously. A serious man would laugh at what wasn’t true. Sure--there was a racy letter which involved black leather halters but she hadn’t expected milk to leak from her breasts at Starbucks either.

The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. This gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V. S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

these have characterized the work of the best American story writers of the last half-century, from John Cheever to Raymond Carver to Lorrie Moore, and the best Canadians, from Alice Munro to Margaret Atwood to Clark Blaise.

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

Let me get straight to the point: The President is requiring his staff to declare an oath of loyalty to him while DOJ looks into the questionable election results. The first person he wanted me to talk to was you. While you were gone, I conducted a thorough background check involving you and your family, and I have a few questions that will resolve whether we keep you. Understand?” “I understand,” “Are you aware that Collins does not like Christians?” “I’ve heard that, yes,” “So why didn’t you inform us of that before you applied for a position in the Secret Service?” “I didn’t know it was that important,” “It’s very important. I also see in your record that you’ve taken classes online from Liberty University and your late wife received an Education degree from Pensacola Christian College. Another item that troubles me is that you’re a regular churchgoer of your local Baptist church, and you’re a member of the Conservative Party. What do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Atwood?” “I don’t see the problem,” Brian

she picked up what looked like a toddler. Then, she came back with the child, who was wrapped in a blanket, and said, “Mr. Atwood, I bring you your son, Joshua James,” “What? Really? Why?” “Yes, really. Why? Well, when President Collins did what he did, he also ordered the Health Administration to start, well, um, liquidating these precious children. Some of us who watch over these children were horrified, and we’re striving to get what children we can back to their parents before those ungodly people from Health start killing all of them.” She handed JJ over to Brian.

That's not to say that all software project management books are crap. Just most of them. One of the few that I've found compelling enough to finish is Johanna Rothman's “Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management.” She co-wrote it with Esther Derby.

We will give you a month to prepare before we take your child to a specialized government health facility in Washington that you can visit for a while when you have a chance, but your son will be weaned off from seeing you. You may work for the FBI, Mr. Atwood, but that fact doesn’t exclude you from ignoring the law. We will inform your superiors of this transgression, you can be sure of that. Take care, Atwood’s, you will be watched closely for the next month. Now, we must go.” As the two were walking to the door, Lynda began to sob, but was also very angry at the same time, “You can’t do this!” “Oh, but we can. We are the government, we can do what we want.

A skeptic of all sentimentality, she has a witty, rueful voice that gives a deadpan appraisal of the past and present. We see the patriotism of World War I turn to chalk as the telegrams begin arriving at home. During the red scares of the 1930s, we listen to the rumbles of labor strife while wealthy barons deride those downtown ruffians pretending to be unemployed. Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton - but don't forget that side order of comic-book science fiction. How goofy to repeatedly interrupt this haunting novel with episodes about the Lizard Men of Xenor. And yet, what great fun this is - and how brilliantly it works to flesh out the dime-novel culture of the 1930s and to emphasize the precarious position of women.

What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some of them wanted, despite themselves, to be seduced. Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

It's an old debate. Should art be good art, or art that's good for you? Once the question gets raised, next thing you know they're banning books in libraries.

In the end, we'll all become stories.” -Margaret Atwood

Once the question gets raised, next thing you know they’re banning books in libraries.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized. —Margaret Atwood

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us. Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?

So many different strands fed into The Handmaid’s Tale – group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the S.S. and the child-stealing of the Argentinian generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy…the list is long. But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her attic room.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? ....Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? ....Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us... ....those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents? - excerpts from Margaret Atwood's introduction (2007) to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Big Brother is very much watching everyone in More’s imagined world: there’s no personal liberty, that great human right that is placed under threat in virtually every modern dystopian novel from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet More doesn’t seem to think this presents a problem.

mention that!). Teresa is way more than an agent. She’s also a lovely, thoughtful person. I’d also like to thank my good friends Susan McKenzie and Lili de Grandpré, for their help and support. And finally I want to say a word about the poetry I use in this book, and the others. As much as I’d love not to say anything and hope you believe I wrote it, I actually need to thank the wonderful poets who’ve allowed me to use their works and words. I adore poetry, as you can tell. Indeed, it inspires me—with words and emotions. I tell aspiring writers to read poetry, which I think for them is often the literary equivalent of being told to eat Brussels sprouts. They’re none too enthusiastic. But what a shame if a writer doesn’t at least try to find poems that speak to him or her. Poets manage to get into a couplet what I struggle to achieve in an entire book. I thought it was time I acknowledged that. In this book I use, as always, works from Margaret Atwood’s slim volume Morning in the Burned House. Not a very cheerful title, but brilliant poems. I’ve also quoted from a lovely old work called The Bells of Heaven by Ralph Hodgson. And a wonderful poem called “Gravity Zero” from an emerging Canadian poet named Mike Freeman, from his book Bones. I wanted you to know that. And I hope these poems speak to you, as they speak to me.

Most of the poems in the collection focus upon the tension between opposites, whether male/female, order / chaos, day/night, rooms/open spaces, or the larger polarities of stasis and movement, self and other. “Journey to the Interior” explores the labyrinth of the self. It is as if the speaker in the earlier poems, having found escape from circle games impossible, has withdrawn into the self only to discover that she is enclosed in the final, most dangerous circle: “it is easier for me to lose my way/forever here, than in other landscapes”. The alternative is to abandon the egocentric self. In “Journey to the Interior”, Atwood expands the self-as-landscape metaphor, introduced in “This Is a Photograph of Me” and appearing again in the final poems of the book, because to see the self as other, as landscape, is a possible way out of the circle.