NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays--funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient--which seek answers to Burning Questions such as:

Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
How can we live on our planet?
Is it true? And is it fair?
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.PART I: 2004 TO 2009 | WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?
scientific romancing 3
frozen in time
from eve to dawn
polonia
somebody’s daughter
five visits to the word-hoard
the echo maker
wetlands
trees of life, trees of death
ryszard kapuściński
anne of green gables
alice munro: an appreciation
ancient balances
scrooge 000
a writing life 000

PART II: 2010 TO 2013 | ART IS OUR NATURE
the writer as political agent? really?
literature and the environment
alice munro
the gift
bring up the bodies
rachel carson anniversary
the futures market
why i wrote maddaddam
seven gothic tales
doctor sleep
doris lessing 00
how to change the world?

PART III: 2014 TO 2016 | WHICH IS TO BE MASTER
in translationland
on beauty
the summer of the stromatolites
kafka
future library
reflections on the handmaid’s tale
we are double-plus unfree
buttons or bows?
gabrielle roy
shakespeare and me
marie-claire blais
kiss of the fur queen
we hang by a thread

PART IV: 2017 TO 2019 | HOW SLIPPERY IS THE SLOPE?
what art under trump?
the illustrated man
am i a bad feminist?
we lost ursula le guin when we needed her most
three tarot cards
a slave state?
oryx and crake
greetings, earthlings! what are these human rights of which you speak?
payback
memory of fire
tell. the. truth.

PART V: 2020 TO 2021 | THOUGHT AND MEMORY
growing up in quarantineland
the equivalents
inseparable
we
the writing of the testaments
the bedside book of birds
perpetual motion and gentleman death
caught in time’s current
big science
barry lopez
the sea trilogy
acknowledgements
credits "[Burning Questions] reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her—literature, feminism, the environment, human rights—and their combustibility...The book’s scope and the perspicacity of her writing evince the reading and thinking of a long life well lived."
—Washington Post

"Inspiring...Always in demand for her keen perception and bewitching storytelling, Atwood presents witty, parrying, and complexly illuminating tales about her long, ever-vital writing life."
—Booklist

"This collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter...Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged."
—Kirkus

“Canadian poet, novelist and literary critic Margaret Atwood’s diverse and intense interests in subjects from feminism to climate change are on full display in her latest book."
—Associated Press

Praise for Margaret Atwood:

“Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“One of the most admired practitioners of the novel in North America.”
—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

"Brilliant...Atwood is a poet....as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous."
—The New Yorker
 
“There may be no novelist better suited to tapping the current era’s anxieties than Margaret Atwood.”
—Entertainment WeeklyMARGARET 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, won the Booker Prize and was longlisted for the Giller 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.CA