O romance distópico "O conto da aia", de Margaret Atwood, se passa num futuro muito próximo e tem como cenário uma república onde não existem mais jornais, revistas, livros nem filmes. As universidades foram extintas. Também já não há advogados, porque ninguém tem direito a defesa. Os cidadãos considerados criminosos são fuzilados e pendurados mortos no Muro, em praça pública, para servir de exemplo enquanto seus corpos apodrecem à vista de todos. Para merecer esse destino, não é preciso fazer muita coisa – basta, por exemplo, cantar qualquer canção que contenha palavras proibidas pelo regime, como "liberdade". Nesse Estado teocrático e totalitário, as mulheres são as vítimas preferenciais, anuladas por uma opressão sem precedentes. O nome dessa república é Gilead, mas já foi Estados Unidos da América.

Uma das obras mais importantes da premiada escritora canadense, conhecida por seu ativismo político, ambiental e em prol das causas femininas, O conto da aia foi escrito em 1985 e inspirou a série homônima (The Handmaid's Tale, no original), produzida pelo canal de streaming Hulu em 2017.

As mulheres de Gilead não têm direitos. Elas são divididas em categorias, cada qual com uma função muito específica no Estado. A Offred coube a categoria de aia, o que significa pertencer ao governo e existir unicamente para procriar, depois que uma catástrofe nuclear tornou estéril um grande número de pessoas. E sem dúvida, ainda que vigiada dia e noite e ceifada em seus direitos mais básicos, o destino de uma aia ainda é melhor que o das não-mulheres, como são chamadas aquelas que não podem ter filhos, as homossexuais, viúvas e feministas, condenadas a trabalhos forçados nas colônias, lugares onde o nível de radiação é mortífero.

Com esta história assustadora, Margaret Atwood leva o leitor a refletir sobre liberdade, direitos civis, poder, a fragilidade do mundo tal qual o conhecemos, o futuro e, principalmente, o presente.

Le chef-d'oeuvre dystopique de Margaret Atwood, La Servante écarlate, est devenu un classique contemporain... auquel elle offre aujourd'hui une spectaculaire conclusion dans cette suite éblouissante.


Quinze ans après les événements de La Servante écarlate, le régime théocratique de la République de Galaad a toujours la mainmise sur le pouvoir, mais des signes ne trompent pas : il est en train de pourrir de l'intérieur.
À cet instant crucial, les vies de trois femmes radicalement différentes convergent, avec des conséquences potentiellement explosives. Deux d'entre elles ont grandi de part et d'autre de la frontière : l'une à Galaad, comme la fille privilégiée d'un Commandant de haut rang, et l'autre au Canada, où elle participe à des manifestations contre Galaad tout en suivant sur le petit écran les horreurs dont le régime se rend coupable. Aux voix de ces deux jeunes femmes appartenant à la première génération à avoir grandi sous cet ordre nouveau se mêle une troisième, celle d'un des bourreaux du régime, dont le pouvoir repose sur les secrets qu'elle a recueillis sans scrupules pour un usage impitoyable. Et ce sont ces secrets depuis longtemps enfouis qui vont réunir ces trois femmes, forçant chacune à s'accepter et à accepter de défendre ses convictions profondes. En dévoilant l'histoire des femmes des Testaments, Margaret Atwood nous donne à voir les rouages internes de Galaad dans un savant mélange de suspense haletant, de vivacité d'esprit et de virtuosité créatrice. »

Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale explores a broad range of issues relating to power, gender, and religious politics. Multiple Golden Globe award-winner Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet, The Hours) gives a stirring performance of this classic in speculative fiction, one of the most powerful and widely read novels of our time.

After a staged terrorist attack kills the President and most of Congress, the government is deposed and taken over by the oppressive and all-controlling Republic of Gilead. Offred, now a Handmaid serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Despite the danger, Offred learns to navigate the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules in hopes of ending this oppression.

‫«زن خوراکی» اولین رمان مارگارت اتوود است که انتشار آن در سال 1969 باعث تثبیت او در مقام نویسنده‌ای برجسته شد. داستان در مورد زن جوانی به نام ماریان است که دنیای منطقی، ساختارمند و مصرف‌گرای او در حال فروپاشی است. بعد از نامزدی، ماریان احساس می‌کند با بدن خود بیگانه شده است. او شروع به اعطای ویژگی‌های انسانی به خوراکی‌ها می‌کند که باعث می‌شود با آن‌ها همذات‌پنداری کند. با این تصویر عجیب و نامانوس، ماریان دیگر نمی‌تواند لب به چیزی بزند، چراکه خوراکی‌ها را به‌ مثابه یک انسان متصوّر می‌شود.

‫این رمان بامزه و گیرا، در مورد سرکوب احساسات، زنان و مردان، و تمایل به همرنگ‌شدن با جماعت‌ است. مارگارت اتوود در رمان «زن خوراکی» با حس شوخ­‌طبعی بالا، با لحنی کنایه‌آمیز و بسیار زیرکانه در مورد ازدواج، گناه و ارتباط بین دو جنس مخالف سخن می­‌گوید.

‫انتشار رمان «زن خوراکی» مصادف با «جنبش زنان» در آمریکای‌شمالی بود، اما اتوود این رمان را نه یک اثری فمینیستی بلکه «صورت اولیهٔ فمینیسم» (پروتوفمینیسم) می‌نامد، چرا که آن در سال ۱۹۶۵ نوشته شده است و بنابراین «موج دوم جنبش فمینیسم» را پیش‌ببینی کرده است.


‫مارگارت اتوود از سال 1963 تا 1964، در یک شرکت تحقیقات نظرسنجی به نام «داده‌های کانادایی» مستقر در تورنتو فعالیت می‌کرد. این شرکت در زمینهٔ راستی‌آزمایی داده‌ها و بازنگری پرسش‌نامه‌های نظرسنجی فعال بود. محیط کار شرکت «داده‌های کانادایی» شبیه به محیط کار شرکت خیالی «مرکز تحقیقات سیمور» رمان «زن خوراکی» اتوود بود، مرکزی که ماریان (شخصیت اصلی رمان) در آنجا مشغول به فعالیت است.

‫ناتالی کوک نویسندهٔ کتاب «مارگارت اتوود: هم‌نشینی نگران‌کننده»، در کتاب خود استدلال می‌کند که شخصیت‌های پیتر و لوسی برگرفته از زندگی خود اتوود هستند _ پیتر نسخهٔ داستانی دوست‌پسر اتوود است؛ عکاسی آماتور که بعدها نامزد او می‌شود. همچنین به‌احتمال زیاد اسم اینزلی هم‌اتاقی و دوست ماریان از نام خوابگاه آنزلی هال در دانشگاه ویکتوریا در تورنتو، که اتوود در آنجا اقامت داشت، الهام گرفته شده است. این خوابگاه که در سال ۱۹۰۳ ویژهٔ دختران ساخته شد، اولین خوابگاه دانشجویی دختران در کانادا بود.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist and poet.

By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.

Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognizable and celebrated themes, but distilled - from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. It is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour.

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments and Alias Grace

'Clara', she said, 'do you think I'm normal?'
'I'd say you're almost abnormally normal, if you know what I mean.'

Marian is determinedly ordinary, waiting to get married. She likes her work, her broody flatmate and her sober fiancé Peter. All goes well at first, but Marian has reckoned without an inner self that wants something more, that calmly sabotages her careful plans, her stable routine - and her digestion. Marriage à la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach . . .

Margaret Atwood's first novel is both a scathingly funny satire of consumerism and a heady exploration of emotional cannibalism.

'Atwood has the magic of turning the particular and the parochial into the universal' The Times

'Written with a brilliant angry energy' Observer

'Margaret Atwood not only has a sense of humour, she has wit and style in abundance . . . a joy to read' Good Housekeeping

'A witty, elegant, generous and patient writer' Punch

Margaret Atwood's witty and informative book focuses on the imaginative mystique of the wilderness of the Canadian North. She discusses the 'Grey Owl Syndrome' of white writers going native; the folklore arising from the mysterious-- and disastrous -- Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century; the myth of the dreaded snow monster, the Wendigo; the relations between nature writing and new forms of Gothic; and how a fresh generation of women writers in Canada have adapted the imagery of the Canadian North for the exploration of contemporary themes of gender, the family and sexuality. Writers discussed include Robert Service, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, E.J. Pratt, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, and Gwendolyn MacEwan.

This superbly written and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.

A breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life—from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

Disturbing, humorous, and compassionate, Cat’s Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman—but above all she must seek release form her haunting memories.

When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: “What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?” Her answer is “survival and victims.”
Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives.

Since its original publication in 1966, this volume has attained classic status. Now its contents have been updated and its cultural framework enlarged by the orginal editors. Many of the 44 stories come from a new writing generation with a contemporary consciousness, and this brilliant blending of masters of the past and the brightest talents of the present achieves the goal of making a great collection even greater.

It's 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.

An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories?

Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.

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Controversial painter Elaine Risley returns from Vancouver for a retrospective of her work. Here, in Toronto, the city of her youth, she confronts the submerged layers of her past – her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love in diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand. The realm of childhood and growing up, with its secrecies, cruelties, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so brilliantly evoked. By turns disquieting, humorous, compassionate, haunting and mordant, Cat’s Eye is vintage Atwood.

The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men of its population. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment's calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid's Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.

A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s “The Decameron.”
When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it.
In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote “The Decameron”: one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables.
In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction?

The fifty essays in Second Words span the period from 1962 to 1980 and reveal Margaret Atwood's views on feminism, Canadian literature, the creative process, nationalism, sexism, as well as critical commentary on such writers as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more.

A FUN AND FEARLESS ANTHOLOGY OF FEMINIST TALES, to celebrate Virago's 50th birthday, featuring NEW AND ORIGINAL STORIES by Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O'Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith - introduced by Sandi Toksvig.

DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO. For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time.

A dazzling collection of fifteen stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments.
Margaret Atwood is celebrated as one of the most gifted storytellers in the world.
These stories explore the full warp and weft of experience, from two best friends disagreeing about their shared past, to the right way to stop someone from choking; from a daughter determining if her mother really is a witch, to what to do with inherited relics such as World War II parade swords.
They feature beloved cats, a confused snail, Martha Gellhorn, George Orwell, philosopher-astronomer-mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales.
At the heart of the collection is a stunning sequence that follows a married couple as they travel the road together, the moments big and small that make up a long life of love—and what comes after.
The glorious range of Atwood's creativity and humanity is on full beam in these tales, which by turns delight, illuminate and quietly devastate.

More than fifteen years after the events of
, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.
Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.
As Atwood unfolds
, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.