In these ten dazzling interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences—the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present. In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.

Throughout the years, you live and witness and experience. And all of those phenomena are recalled later in varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. These excerpts from life are periods of personal tumult, events that generated intense emotions, and accounts of others' conquests that are so poignant you've never forgotten them, not one detail. They are variations of trite phrases that you've altered to help you better remember them, and fictional stories incubated in your imagination that you augment to become more complex and pleasing. They are funny things you used to say, a trademark phrase, a "youmark"-something everyone at the party expects to hear at least twice from you. You collect them and protect them because they mean something to you, and maybe only you-they are you. We all live with this cognitive debris, and how we interpret and react to the events of each day is filtered through the prism it creates in each of us. This is mine.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.

By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg infuses a Canada of the 1940s, '50s and '80s with glowing childhood memories, the harsh realities of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty that men and women inflict on each other. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mudane lives and unexpected loves. But here too is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them—the intimately personal, the fantastic and the shockingly real...whether it's what lies in a mysterious locked room or in the secret feelings we all conceal.

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—a thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking collection of stories that affirms Atwood as our greatest creator of worlds—and as an incisive chronicler of our darkest impulses. “Alphinland,” the first of three loosely linked tales, introduces us to a fantasy writer who is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. In “Lusus Naturae,” a young woman, monstrously transformed by a genetic defect, is mistaken for a vampire. And in the title story, a woman who has killed four husbands discovers an opportunity to exact vengeance on the first man who ever wronged her. Stone Mattress is a collection of unforgettable tales that reveal the grotesque, delightfully wicked facets of humanity.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the shape of a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. The past resurfaces in the present in ways both subtle and dramatic: the body of a lost Arctic explorer emerges from the ice, a 2,000-year-old bog man turns up in an archeological dig, a man with dark secrets marries his lover’s sister, a girl who disappears on a canoe trip haunts her friend many decades later. The richly layered stories in Wilderness Tips map interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and lost chances, endowing even the most unassuming of lives with a disquieting intensity.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.

Drawing upon both classical insights and more recent writings, Hearn provides a compelling account of social breakdown in the United States. The book examines the conditions most responsible for the deterioration of social institutions, notably the family, and of communitarian interdependencies, such as those that support neighborhoods. More specifically, Hearn analyzes the defining forces of liberal modernity--among them, especially, the market economy (favored by the political right) and the democratic welfare state (endorsed by the political left)--whose steady expansion has diminished the social contexts that nurture trust, mutuality, and a robust sense of both personal responsibility and social obligation. The originality of Hearn's book lies in the solutions he proposes, which differ from those rooted in what Hearn calls "the languages of modernity." Hearn advocates modes that would serve instead to renew solidarity and reclaim social virtue, a repertory of strategies that would answer Emile Durkheim's call for the creation of moral individualism. He assesses various approaches to revitalizing the social settings, the social institutions, and communitarian structures within which people become moral individuals capable of care about and taking responsibility for the fates of others. Readers of this book are invited to draw their own conclusions by relying in larger part on themselves as parents, neighbors, community members, and citizen-participants in a civil society in restoration. As the "American Journal of Sociology" notes, "the book succeeds in its goals, and it deserves to be widely read." "Frank Hearn" was professor of sociology at the State University of New York, College of Cortland, and the author of "Reason and Freedom in Sociological Thought" and "The Transformation of Industrial Organization."