Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet's syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A...
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A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet's syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite.
In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle – and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780385539128 (0385539126)
Publish date: 2014-09-16
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Pages no: 273
Edition language: English
There are nine short stories in this collection. I liked that the first three were somehow connected -- it gives a rare glimpse into an author's train of thoughts in (a larger) plot development, and how different characters' perspectives can come together to make a full-length novel.
In this one, Margaret Atwood deals with elderly topics of concern, such as assisted living, funerals, and falling. The first three stories were my favorite and served as a kind of trilogy, if you will. They are about the aging author of a fantasy series named Constance, and her early love affair ...
I loved "The Dead Hand Loves You" way more than I should've. I dig the old horror, just watched The Thing That Wouldn't Die last night. The tropes are amazing - the wide eyes, the unbridled lust! This collection is not a collection of short stories, it's a collection of smirks. Atwood is very smirky...
Margaret Atwood has always been on my radar, although due to my complete and utter laziness I hadn’t really explored her work all that much. I did eventually get to The Handmaid’s Tale a few months ago, and I was pretty impressed with it. And then I found out that she wrote one of my favorite short ...
Title: Stone Mattress Who Wrote It? Margaret Atwood, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale, the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and Maddadam) and a host of other novels, short story and poetry collections (though, really, did I need to introduce her?). More at At...
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