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Overview
Alongside meditations on warlords, cat heaven, and orphans, the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers a sly pep talk to the ambitious young, laments the proliferation of photos of oneself, imagines an apocalypse of worms, and recalls Helen of Troy’s childhood Kool-Aid stand.
In the title fable, a writer huddled inside a tent of paper engages in doodling as self-defense, scribbling on the walls in a frantic attempt to keep out encroaching horrors.
Adorned with her own playful illustrations, The Tent is a delightful mélange of short fiction that pushes the boundaries of form in intriguing directions, replete with Atwood’s droll humor, keen insight, and lyric brilliance.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780307386946 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 05/08/2007 |
Sold by: | Random House |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 176 |
Sales rank: | 722,987 |
File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Hometown:
Toronto, OntarioDate of Birth:
November 18, 1939Place of Birth:
Ottawa, OntarioEducation:
B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967Website:
http://www.owtoad.comRead an Excerpt
The Tent
By Margaret Atwood
Random House
Margaret AtwoodAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0385516681
Chapter One
Life Stories
Why the hunger for these? If it is a hunger. Maybe it's more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge, of the life, no matter who lived it.
It helps if there are photos. No more choices for the people in them -- pick this one, dump that one. The livers of the lives in question had their chances, most of which they blew. They should have spotted the photographer in the bushes, they shouldn't have chewed with their mouths open, they shouldn't have worn the strapless top, they shouldn't have yawned, they shouldn't have laughed: so unattractive, the candid denture. So that's what she looked like, we say, connecting the snapshot to the year of the torrid affair. Face like a half-eaten pizza, and is that him, gaping down her front? What did he see in her, besides cheap lunch? He was already going bald. What was all the fuss about?
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. It's mostly a question of editing. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blownby the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.
Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways? I can't remember.
Once you get started it's fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window. I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you've slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can't recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?
I'm getting somewhere now, I'm feeling lighter. I'm coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.
I was born.
I was.
I.
Excerpted from The Tent by Margaret Atwood Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
I.Life Stories Clothing Dreams Bottle
Impenetrable Forest
Encouraging the Young Voice No More Photos
Orphan Stories Gateway
Bottle II
II.
Winter’s Tales
It’s Not Easy Being Half-Divine
Salome Was a Dancer
Plots for Exotics Resources of the Ikarians Our Cat Enters Heaven
Chicken Little Goes Too Far
Thylacine Ragout The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins
Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon
Take Charge
Post-Colonial
Heritage House
Bring Back Mom: An Invocation
III.
Horatio’s Version
King Log in Exile
Faster Eating the Birds
Something Has Happened Nightingale
Warlords The Tent
Time Folds
Tree Baby But It Could Still