Burning Questions

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from debt and tech to the climate crisis and freedom and the importance of how to define granola.

"A new collection of essays from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments. Short Description / Web 'About this Book' From literary icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of nonfiction-funny, erudite, intimate, impassioned, and always startlingly prescient-which grapples with such wide-ranging topics as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How do we get rid of the immense amount of plastic that's littering our seas and lands? How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? Is science fiction now writing us? So what if beauty is only skin deep? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? Is it true? And is it fair? In over fifty pieces, taken from lectures, autobiographical essays, book reviews, cultural criticism, obituaries, and new introductions to her own body of work (including The Handmaid's Tale thirty years after its initial publication) as well as that of other writers, we watch Atwood aim her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and report back to us on what she finds. From asking what society's youth expects from its elders (2004), to pondering the philosophical underpinnings of debt (2008, not surprisingly), to encountering a mysterious new platform called Twitter (2009), to asking if it is, in fact, too late to save the planet (2015) or what forces have been unleashed in the age of Trump (2016), and culminating in a breathtaking meditation on grief and poetry in the wake of her own loss (2020), Atwood provokes, probes, delights, surprises, and rewards the reader at every turn"--