Bluebeard's Egg

by Margaret Atwood

Overview

With the publication of the best-selling The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, Margaret Atwood's place in North American letters was reconfirmed. Poet, short story writer, and novelist, she was acclaimed "one of the most intelligent and talented writers to set herself the task of deciphering life in the late twentieth century."*

With Bluebeard's Egg, her second short story collection, Atwood covers a dramatic range of storytelling, her scope encompassing the many moods of her characters, from the desolate to the hilarious.

The stories are set in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s and concern themselves with relationships of various sorts. There is the bond between a political activist and his kidnapped cat, a woman and her dead psychiatrist, a potter and the group of poets who live with her and mythologize her, an artist and the strange men she picks up to use as models. There is a man who finds himself surrounded by women who are literally shrinking, and a woman whose life is dominated by a fear of nuclear warfare; there are telling relationships among parents and children.

By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg explores and illuminates both the outer world in which we all live and the inner world that each of us creates.

*Le Anne Schreiber, Vogue

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544146730
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/29/2013
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	281
Sales rank:	280,437
File size:	516 KB

About the Author

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for her services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

Hometown:

Toronto, Ontario

Date of Birth:

November 18, 1939

Place of Birth:

Ottawa, Ontario

Education:

B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967

Website:

http://www.owtoad.com

What People are Saying About This

Susan F. Schaeffer

These tales expand in the mind until they become novels. The characters...take on lives of their own; they take over yours.

Editorial Reviews

. . .this collection is [not] limited or dully familiar; rather, it attests. . .to Ms. Atwood's range as a writer, her ability to set forth her view of the world in both the capacious form of the novel and the narrower mold of the short story; in both lyrical, meditative tales and wry, crackly satires.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

"Conversations in our family were not about feelings,'' recalls the teenage narrator of "Hurricane Hazel' -- 'about her breakup with a boyfriend who "meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me" -- 'in Atwood's (The Handmaid's Tale, etc.) second collection of shortfiction. Unfortunately, the author's arch cleverness and cool understatement anesthetize the impact of the stories' conversations and gloomy relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Symbols abound and some, reminiscent of Atwood's "edible woman'' cake in the book of the same title, are strained. In "Uglypuss,'' the discordant lovers are political activists; at one point they plan to picket a sock company and dramatize the crucifixion, portraying Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes. But the collection is somewhat redeemed by the affecting title story, where an egg, a deceptively innocuous object that, according to the legend, ultimately marks as disobedient two of Bluebeard's unfortunate wives, aptly symbolizes the protagonist's premonitions of doom about her marriage to a man she is desperately afraid of losing, although she describes him as obtuse, blundering and predictable.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this delightful collection of short stories, Atwood (The Blind Assassin) explores relationships between men and women, parents and children, and people and pets. She also touches on anorexia and adult children of elderly parents. In typical Atwood fashion, the characters and locations are described in detail. Bonnie Hurren transports the listener into the author's world with her excellent pronunciation and slow, well-paced intonation. Each cassette stops at a convenient point in the story rather than whenever the tape ends. While this requires the listener to fast-forward each tape before changing sides, it makes it easier to follow the story line. Recommended for popular fiction collections and any library serving Atwood fans. Laurie Selwyn, San Antonio P.L. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Although events occur, these stories are much more analytical than dramatic in their telling, more 'spelled out' than glancing or impressionistic. At times their inspiration seems as much journalistic or sociological as fictional. The distance that Ms. Atwood keeps -- the unblinking detachment with which she views her creations -- means that her readers, while interested and often amused, are not likely to become much involved. Her psychological astuteness is everywhere in evidence, though, whether she is observing a dispirited family on vacation in Trinidad ('Scarlet Ibis') or the sullen evasiveness of an anorexic girl in a hospital ('Spring Song of the Frogs'). Her prose is controlled, her sentences carefully turned to reflect the workings of her finely tuned intelligence.

Robert Towers

A book to be read and re-read, to be talked about and savored. . . . Atwood [is] writing at top form, writing with total control of her material, with sureness, with touches of brilliance.” —The London Free Press

“This collection . . .  attests, again, to Ms. Atwood’s range as a writer, her ability to set forth her view of the world . . . in both lyrical, meditative tales and wry, crackly satires. . . . These stories are strewn, like a starry sky, with shimmering images and bright metaphors.” —The New York Times

"A startlingly original voice." —Washington Post Book World

"Atwood's prose in Bluebeard's Egg is powerful, elegant and mellifluous to an extraordinary degree." —Quill and Quire

From the Publisher