Publisher Description
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.
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About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the acclaimed author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. She is the recipient of dozens of awards, including joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019, as well as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, among many others.
About the Narrators
Ann-Marie
Macdonald,
a playwright, actress, and novelist, won the Governor General’s Award for
Drama, the Chalmers Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award for her
play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning
Juliet).
Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of several books, including The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Margaret Atwood is the acclaimed author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. She is the recipient of dozens of awards, including joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019, as well as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, among many others.
Esi Edugyan is the author of several books, including Washington Black, longlisted for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Half Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and the Orange Prize. Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of 2004’s Books to Remember. She has a masters degree in writing from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and has held fellowships in the United States, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She has taught creative writing at both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria and has sat on many international panels.
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions.