Margaret Atwood has earned her place as a literary seer, a prophet, a sage elder — or, as she recently described herself, “elderly icon or scary witchy granny.” She’s frequently asked to speak about women’s issues, because of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the looming climate catastrophe, because of the MaddAddam trilogy. Audiences want to hear from the 82-year-old author whose fiction foresees the rise of a patriarchal fascist state and cataclysmic environmental collapse.
“People are deeply worried about the future right now,” Atwood told me during a phone call from her home in Canada. “Things are in turmoil — partly because of climate change; partly because democratic norms and procedures that we took for granted and believed represented the true, the good and the beautiful, have been tossed out the window.”
Picture a romance novel. Are there heaving bosoms and swaggering poses? Is the word “trashy” one of the first to pop into your mind? If so, your stereotypes are decades out of date. Recent years have seen a marked shift away from shirtless ab shots and “clinch covers” that feature a passionate embrace toward bright, flirty graphics. Modern romance covers are opting for graphic illustration in a bid to outrun the sexist stigma that has dogged the genre since its inception and repackage the books for new audiences. This evolution reflects changes within the genre and broader attitudes toward it as well.
We are naturally inclined to stay away from things we find unpleasant, and there's a chance pandemic literature strikes some readers as precisely that. However, the narratives we've seen so far have shown that the pandemic can be a starting point for any story — and that writing about it can be a way of processing trauma, an exercise in trying to understand its impact on our psyche. This literature can add to a growing map of work that helps us navigate not only recent history but also our present and immediate future.
Weaving seemingly disjointed aspects of human history into a coherent exploration of the mechanics of race and racism is no small task. Yet in her new essay collection, Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan does it with apparent ease. In a class beyond the now popular “race 101” genre, Out of the Sun is concerned with coming to terms with the fictions we create about ourselves, and asking why we do so. It explores race, identity and Blackness in their ever-shifting contexts, asking uncomfortable questions about our framing of the past and our desires for the future.
Ockham and his outsize, vital influence on the sciences are the subject of University of Surrey genetics professor Johnjoe McFadden’s new book, Life Is Simple. In it, McFadden follows the full developmental arc of science in the western world and highlights the way Occam’s courage and principles led to almost every major discovery that came after.
My heart is a knot
that you are tied up in—