WHEN I FIRST see Margaret Atwood, she's bundled up. Red hat over her famous silver curls, long puffy coat, boots befitting a Canadian winter. The right outfit for a profoundly gray Toronto day, especially since she'd trudged over to meet me. "I walk everywhere!" she says merrily, unspooling her "scarf. I almost feel bad for taking a cab to the restaurant. She's come to discuss her new book, Old Babes in the Wood. It's her ninth collection of short stories, adding to a sprawling body of work that includes 17 novels and 18 volumes of poetry. Old Babes is Atwood at her most whimsical: A snail swaps bodies with a human, an alien tries to translate a fairy tale, a seance summons the ghost of George Orwell. The collection is bookended by bruising stories about Nell and Tig, a devoted couple Atwood introduced in 2006's Moral Disorder. This time around, Nell mourns Tig's illness and eventual death-it's a melancholy love story as affecting as any of Atwood's strongest work.
展开▼
