Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
Margaret Atwood
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
Margaret Atwood
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood’s first collection since Moral Disorder in 2006, begins with three linked stories about women who have been romantically involved with a middling poet named Gavin Putnam.
...tilt several degrees away from the ordinary, riffing on the fantastic, the macabre, and the grim.
In this case, it’s a gathering of what she calls Nine Tales, most of them relatively long stories by comparison with her earlier work, a gathering that I couldn’t be happier to have ...first three pieces — endearing, subtle, quite brilliant in their execution — create de facto skein of characters, a group of Toronto writers and poets who have known each other, and become romantically entangled with each other, for some decades ...rest of the pieces in this volume each stand alone.
The stories in Stone Mattress, her latest book, possess that quality; they also tend to stray beyond the boundaries of realism and into the psychic terrain of the teller. Predictably amazing, this collection — eclectic, funny, vibrant, terrifying, beautiful and utterly delightful — illustrates why Atwood is a fan favorite as well as a critic’s dream .... While many of the men in Stone Mattress are revealed as ego-driven, highly functioning idiots who inflate their mediocre intelligence and minor successes, often at the risk of their lives...Atwood is equally critical of the women who tolerate such behavior, and they often meet similar disastrous ends, moral and otherwise ...offer piercing insight into the absurdity of human kindness and cruelty, thereby forcing the reader to reckon profoundly with these realities ...remind us that we all live under the veil of our delusions, and it’s up to us to find the courage to lift this veil and examine what’s beneath..
These are tales steeped in primal themes: the hero's journey, revenge, betrayal, gallantry, the outcast, the tragic. In the acknowledgments section of her new short story collection, Stone Mattress, Canadian Margaret Atwood illuminates her book's mythic intent...book opens with a trio of captivating, linked stories about a group of artists and writers and their romantic imbroglios.
Margaret Atwood's latest story collection, Stone Mattress, is subtitled 'Nine Tales' to signal its interest in the folkloric, the macabre and the supernatural.
Stone Mattress is expertly arranged, its first section containing a set of three, interconnected stories, with each subsequent work linked to the rest through a slow, thematic unfolding ...represent Atwood at her best, and the consistency of her candor and humor carries across a wide variety of tones and generic conventions.
...in her new collection of stories, Margaret Atwood emphasizes one particular Atwood quality, which, for lack of a better word, I'll call 'wicked'.
There are also tales about tales – pulp horror, epic fantasy, love poetry – with nearly all the characters looking back from old age on a distant past that has become its own mythological landscape.
Stylish, acerbic and wickedly funny, Margaret Atwood has assembled a group of stories in which people reflect on past lives while soldiering on.
That’s often true in Atwood’s writing, which tends to be beautifully mannered and precise as its characters think things through in bloodless detail, then act according to hidden desires rather than their own well-presented reasoning ...many other characters in these stories are late in life, looking back toward old traumas, papered over by decades of other events. The theme isn’t heavily underlined, but it’s enough of a backbone to make these otherwise disparate, mostly new stories hold together.
Decay makes us vulnerable, and it has a noxious perfume.That’s one takeaway from Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, her first collection of short fiction in eight years. Its nine tales focus largely on narrators in the throes of old age or illness.
...in Stone Mattress, Atwood brings together nine stories that illustrate her exploring new themes even as she revisits familiar ones.
Clever tales about writers, lovers and other weirdos.
Atwood, a bestselling master of fiction, delivers a stunning collection—her first since 2006's Moral Disorder. Most of the nine stories feature women who have been wronged as girls but recover triumphantly as adults ...brings her biting wit to bear on the battle of the sexes.