Burning questions : essays and occasional pieces 2004-2021 / Margaret Atwood.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 452-457) and index.

From literary icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of nonfiction -- funny, erudite, intimate, impassioned, and always startlingly prescient -- which grapples with such wide-ranging topics as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How do we get rid of the immense amount of plastic that's littering our seas and lands? How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? Is science fiction now writing us? So what if beauty is only skin deep? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? Is it true? And is it fair? In over fifty pieces, taken from lectures, autobiographical essays, book reviews, cultural criticism, obituaries, and new introductions to her own body of work (including "The Handmaid's Tale" thirty years after its initial publication) as well as that of other writers, we watch Atwood aim her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and report back to us on what she finds. From asking what society's youth expects from its elders (2004), to pondering the philosophical underpinnings of debt (2008, not surprisingly), to encountering a mysterious new platform called Twitter (2009), to asking if it is, in fact, too late to save the planet (2015) or what forces have been unleashed in the age of Trump (2016), and culminating in a breathtaking meditation on grief and poetry in the wake of her own loss (2020), Atwood provokes, probes, delights, surprises, and rewards the reader at every turn" -- Provided by publisher.

Part I: 2004-2009. What will happen next?. Scientific romancing ; Frozen in time ; From eve to dawn ; Polonia ; Somebody's daughter ; Five visits to the word-hoard ; The echo maker ; Wetlands ; Trees of life, trees of death ; Ryszard Kapuściński ; Anne of Green Gables ; Alice Munro: an appreciation ; Ancient balances ; Scrooge ; A writing life -- Part II: 2010-2013. Art is our nature. The writer as political agent? Really? ; Literature and the environment ; Alice Munro ; The gift ; Bring up the bodies ; Rachel Carson anniversary ; The futures market ; Why I wrote Maddaddam ; Seven gothic tales ; Doctor sleep ; Doris Lessing ; How to change the world? -- Part III: 2014-2016. Which is to be master. In translationland ; On beauty ; The summer of the stromatolites ; Kafka ; Future library ; Reflections on The handmaid's tale ; We are double-plus unfree ; Buttons or bows? ; Gabrielle Roy ; Shakespeare and me ; Marie-Claire blais ; Kiss of the fur queen ; We hang by a thread -- Part IV: 2017-2019. How slippery is the slope?. What art under Trump? ; The illustrated man ; Am I a bad feminist? ; We lost Ursula Le Guin when we needed her most ; Three tarot cards ; A slave state? ; Oryx and crake ; Greetings, earthlings! What are these human rights of which you speak? ; Payback ; Memory of fire ; Tell, the, truth -- Part V: 2020-2021. Thought and memory. Growing up in quarantineland ; The equivalents ; Inseparable ; We ; The writing of The testaments ; The bedside book of birds ; Perpetual motion and gentleman death ; Caught in time's current ; Big science ; Barry Lopez ; The sea trilogy.