Burning Questions
Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2022
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Written by:
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Margaret Atwood
About this listen
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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What the critics say
—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 Weekly
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Well worth the listen
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Worth a listen
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I am always enchanted by how deftly she folds the main idea of her work in and out of literature and the real world making it ever clear that the line between the two is tenuous at best.
Witty, touching, thought provoking.
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Impeccable
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Truth between the linez
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