Moral Disorder: A Story

The author of such towering novels as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood creates worlds just as vividly in her short fiction. In the title story from her acclaimed collection of linked stories Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood takes us to the farm.

Newly arrived city slickers, like Nell and Tig, shouldn’t have animals; a notion corroborated by the true farmers down the road: for them, livestock would mean dead stock. But Tig’s two boys will be at the f...