Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood, born 1939 in Ottawa, Canada, is a force to be reckoned with in 20th and 21st Century literature. She grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec and in Toronto. Her education was Canadian with a salting of graduate work at Radcliffe and Harvard in the US. She can turn a skilled hand to short stories, poetry, essays and reviews, and novels. She is an enthusiastic transgressor of categories, so-called literary genres, and she is generous with introductions, forewords, and prefaces to other writers. She wants to comprehend it all, and she wants her readers to keep up.
I was very fortunate to support Atwood when she gave a talk at Dickinson College, providing books and sales support after her presentation. We had a chance to really talk. I was amazed by her sophisticated grasp of the book business (most writers really don’t care, which I think is odd). She was keen, alert, full of questions, interested. We seemed to hit it off as cousin-professionals. I always appreciate her for it and am grateful for her generosity.
Lady Oracle
Lady Oracle
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments—the “brilliant and funny” story (Joan Didion, bestselling author of Let Me Tell You What I Mean) of a woman whose attempts to escape herself become instead an occasion for confronting the self-deception that has driven her since childhood
Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband.
After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan’s response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy.
Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.