Moral Disorder and Other Stories

Zusatztext “Sharply focused! intensely personal. . . . Moral Disorder is domestic realism at its most convincing. . . . These are poignant stories crammed with richly nostalgic detail! rueful! wise! elegiac.” —Joyce Carol Oates! The New York Review of Books “Elegant. . . . In Moral Disorder ! Atwood travels deep into the expanse of memories and language built up over her writing lifetime and offers a handful of gems to illuminate our times.” — The Los Angeles Times Book Review “Poignant. . . . Wry. . . . The tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood's] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.” — New York Times Book Review “Searingly intelligent. . . . [These are] beguiling narratives that Atwood unspools with signature grace and incisiveness.” — Elle Informationen zum Autor Margaret Atwood Klappentext From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments • This brilliant collection of connected short stories strings together several decades of moments in the life of one woman—as an ambitious girl in the 1930s, as a young professional coming of age in the uncertain ‘50s and ‘60s, and as half of a couple growing old together. In a series of vividly evoked settings that span cities, backwoods, and farm country, we see this woman contending over time with an unstable sister, a married lover, aging parents, mystifying stepchildren, vulnerable farm animals, and her own changing self. By turns funny, lyrical, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Margaret Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. From "The Headless Horseman" For Halloween that year — the year my sister was two — I dressed up as the Headless Horseman. Before, I’d only ever been ghosts and fat ladies, both of which were easy: all you needed was a sheet and a lot of talcum powder, or a dress and a hat and some padding. But this year would be the last one I’d ever be able to disguise myself, or so I believed. I was getting too old for it — I was almost finished with being thirteen — and so I felt the urge to make a special effort.   Halloween was my best holiday. Why did I like it so much? Perhaps because I could take time off from being myself, or from the impersonation of myself I was finding it increasingly expedient, but also increasingly burdensome, to perform in public.   I got the Headless Horseman idea from a story we’d read in school. In the story, the Headless Horseman was a grisly legend and also a joke, and that was the effect I was aiming for. I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I’d studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.   I had an image of how the Headless Horseman was supposed to look. He was said to ride around at night with nothing on top of his shoulders but a neck, his head held in one arm, the eyes fixing the horrified viewer in a ghastly glare. I made the head out of papier mâché, using strips of newspaper soaked in a flour-and-water paste I cooked myself, as per the instructions in The Rainy Day Book of Hobbies . Earlier in my life — long ago, at least two years ago — I’d had a wistful desire to make all the things suggested in this book: animals twisted out of pipe cleaners, balsa-wood boats that would whiz around when you dropped cooking oil into a hole in the middle, and a tractor thing put together out of an empty thread s...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Margaret Atwood
• Editore: Anchor Books USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 12.02.2008
• EAN: 9780385721646
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72164-6
• Pagine: 240
• Dimensioni: 130 mm x 200 mm x 17 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi; BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Astrology / General, Astrology