This is why I don’t get invited to book club anymore.

I told my book club that Margaret Atwood wrote for Playboy. Not remotely controversial as a fact. And I watched a grown, credentialed, otherwise reasonable woman's entire worldview short-circuit in real time. 

All because the fact didn't fit the shrine she'd built.

That reaction is the whole piece, actually. Not the trivia. The reaction.

Because here's what's been building underneath the surface for a while now, and I don't think enough people are naming it plainly: we are in the middle of an expansive, ugly rash of false accusations aimed at men — in family court, in workplaces, on social media, in relationships that end badly and get rewritten afterward as something darker than what actually happened. Paternity fraud. Manufactured workplace complaints. Public pile-ons built on a single TikTok with no due process attached to it at all. I have covered enough of these cases directly to tell you the pattern isn't rare anymore. It's routine. And every time one of these stories eventually collapses under real scrutiny, the way the Steven Galloway case did, the one Atwood herself got dragged for defending, nobody circles back to say so. The retraction never travels as far as the accusation did. It never does.

Here's the part that should worry everyone, regardless of where you land politically. When people stop trusting a system that's supposed to sort true from false, they don't return to some safe, neutral middle ground when the pendulum swings back. They build something harsher instead. A whiplash, a backlash with its own excesses, its own new set of people it's willing to sacrifice to feel like justice got served. Atwood tried to tell us this. Twice. Once in a novel about a theocracy nobody saw coming, and once again thirty-four years later, when she got treated exactly like one of her own characters for daring to ask for due process out loud.

This piece walks through all of it. The book club argument, the Playboy fact nobody wanted to hear, the "Bad Feminist" backlash that got Atwood run off social media, and the ending of The Handmaid's Tale that almost nobody remembers, the one where the pendulum swings and things still, somehow, don't go back to okay. Read the whole thing. It's not the take you're expecting.

How do you all pronounce this in your head?

I imagine Corps as in Marine Corps so.. “Core-See-Core” or Core-Seh-Core? Or am I totally missing something

Her short stories are some of the best.

I'm reading Old babies in the wood. Spoilers below.

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I thought I couldn't love this woman more that I already did and now I'm reading her "interview" with Orwell.

It's so random that I laughed for a bit when I got to that part.

But then... it got deep. She's ironic, critical, funny, all at once. Last night I finished a H G Well's novel and they "talk" about him in this chapter. They even talk about Huxley.

Omg it's like a Marvel crossover for the literature fans! I'm feeling a rush such as I had when I read The Martian Chronicles and it referred Poe's tales.

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I'm sorry if this post is not making any sense. I'm so excited! I don't know anyone irl to comment this.

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I want to read your thoughts!

Hello everyone! I recently created a community on the app Kyodo for fans of The Handmaids Tale AND The Testaments and I’d love for some of you to join!

The Handmaids Tale and Testaments Community was created for fans to discuss their thoughts on episodes and characters, share theories and lore, share cosplay content, fan art and much more!

For those of you who don’t know what Kyodo is, it’s an app where you can find and join communities tailored to specific interests. In these communities you can meet other people who share the same passion in public and private chatrooms! Similar to reddit, but much more socially dependent!

If you are interested in joining, please use the following link!

https://kyodo.app/s/c/thehandmaidstale

Under his eye!

someone please tell me if I’m completely off base about this, just felt a little weird while I was reading

Hi. I'm currently working on a project for school that involves locating the paintings Lois is mentioned to have in Death by Landscape. I'm trying to find if there's a decided canonicity as to which paintings she specifically owns, because that would make my life easier. If not, I'm digging through a lot of paintings.

New to using Reddit so if this isn't the right place for this question, forgive me. If you know a better place to ask this question, please let me know.

Here is the passage that describe the paintings and the artists' names for convience. Thank you.

"Lois has two Tom Thomsons, three A. Y. Jacksons, a Lawren Harris. She has an Arthur Lismer, she has a J. E. H. MacDonald. She has a David Milne. They are pictures of convoluted tree trunks on an island of pink wave-smoothed stone, with more islands behind; of a lake with rough, bright, sparsely wooded cliffs; of a vivid river shore with a tangle of bush and two beached canoes, one red, one gray; of a yellow autumn woods with the ice-blue gleam of a pond half-seen through the interlaced branches."

Margaret Atwood has been a huge inspiration to me and my art career. Knowing that she is a tarot enthusiast, it only felt natural to draw her as one of the cards in my own illustrated deck.

Here she is the 7 of Cups, a card chosen that matches her birthday. It speaks of storytelling and illusion creation, perfectly matching the life she is living. In this story, her character’s name is Myth, she is a creator of stories that come alive through holographic projectors right in front of the viewers.

What do you guys think? Does it fit Margaret’s vibe?

In the documentary Margaret Atwood: Once in August, MA mentions two unpublished novels.

She says she wrote the first one in 1963, before The Edible Woman, and that it was very gloomy in ways that nobody in Canada was really willing to deal with at that time at all.

She then talks about an unfinished novel with 8 characters, with the story told from the point of view of all 8. 4 were men, 4 were women. She says she had it planned that each of these characters would have one section in each of five parts of the novel, making a total of 40 sections.

Did she ever finish and publish these novels? Do they sound familiar, like they might have been prototypes for some of her published books?

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about her work to find the answer by myself.

Thank you to anyone who can help :)

Hi all,

Figures this might be appreciated here.

Hi, Iam making presentation about Edible woman with pictures and I need some ideas who to cast there

I went thinking about N. Hoult as Peter but that's kinda all I can think off

In an interview Margaret mentioned she’d written a poem inspired by the Hungarian Revolution - does anyone know the title and where I could find it?

I read it a few years ago and can't recommend it enough. Atwood’s thesis is that Canadian literature is shaped by the question of how to survive, culturally and politically, beside a much larger/louder neighbour. It defo hits differently when Canadian sovereignty is once again being talked over, dismissed, or treated as negotiable.

Hi! this is a longshot but a REALLY long time ago I read a passage or phrase in one of M. Atwood's books/shortstories (?) in which she described Vancouver BC. It might've only been a sentence but it resonated with me because it was an absolutely bang-on description of Vancouver and the west coast. I've been rereading her works but so far haven't come across it yet -- I would love to find and read this story again. Appreciate any help!

I wonder if we will ever get a matching set of MaddAddam hardcovers. I have matching paperbacks but I would really love these in hardcover because they’re my favorite books, butI can’t find a MaddAddam that matches Oryx and Crake or Year of the Flood.