Stone Mattress - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this extraordinary collection, Margaret Atwood gives us nine unforgettable tales that reveal the grotesque, delightfully wicked facets of humanity"--

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments--a thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking collection of stories that affirms Atwood as our greatest creator of worlds--and as an incisive chronicler of our darkest impulses.

"Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked tales, introduces us to a fantasy writer who is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. In "Lusus Naturae," a young woman, monstrously transformed by a genetic defect, is mistaken for a vampire. And in the title story, a woman who has killed four husbands discovers an opportunity to exact vengeance on the first man who ever wronged her.

Stone Mattress is a collection of unforgettable tales that reveal the grotesque, delightfully wicked facets of humanity.

Review Quotes

"Eclectic, funny, vibrant, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly delightful." --The Boston Globe

"A tour de force of wit, style, and discernment." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"Astonishing. . . . Powerful. . . . I loved these strange, sharp and wild stories." --Meg Wolitzer, NPR

"Pure, simple and stunning. . . . Endearing, subtle, quite brilliant." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Powerful. . . . Witty and frequently biting, Stone Mattress is keen to the ways in which we choose, all our lives, to love and to hurt--and in Atwood's world these two actions are always choices, creating consequences for which we will one day be held to account." --The New York Times Book Review

"Danc[es] over the dark swamps of Horror on the wings of satirical wit. . . . Look at these tales . . . as eight icily refreshing arsenic Popsicles followed by a baked Alaska laced with anthrax, all served with impeccable style and aplomb. Enjoy!" --Ursula K. Le Guin, Financial Times

"The collection is surprisingly unsettling, gripping and at once laugh-out-loud hilarious. It attains its laudable goal: Myths last over time, and the stories in this book have that very quality. They are timeless, memorable and quite simply fun." --Chicago Tribune

"Powerful. . . . Extraordinary. . . . Realism and ridiculousness, play and deadly seriousness, are held in fine balance throughout." --The Guardian (London)

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.

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.