The Tent - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)

About the Book

Atwood is one of the world's most esteemed authors, a writer of wide range--novels, stories, essays, criticism. She now brings readers a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays punctuated with her own wonderful illustrations.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Delectably astringent. . . . These succinct, acridly funny pieces. . . deliver a heady punch." --Los Angeles Times

"She has a cool wit, sometimes brutally satirical, always entertaining, and serious to the bone." --Katherine Dunn, The Oregonian

"Atwood's sentences have more bounce and boogie than those of most twentysomethings.... And although these stories take many forms, from extended metaphor to anecdote, from poem to gag, they are all very much to do with the life and opinions of Margaret Atwood." --The Times (London)

"The Tent exposes the nuts and bolts of the tortuous creative process....The book powerfully exhibits the human consciousness in conversation with itself, struggling to establish a voice amid the cacophony." --The Observer

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.