Bluebeard's Egg is a collection of short stories by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, first published in 1983. The book's first American edition was released in 1986 under the name Bluebeard's Egg and other stories. [1]
In this collection, Atwood explores the politics of sex and heterosexual relationships, examining the emotions, betrayals, and casualties of such relationships. Four of the stories in the collection depart from this theme to instead present presumably autobiographic ruminations on the narrator's childhood influences. The majority of these stories are set in downtown Toronto. [2]
The two stories omitted in the US 1986 edition were both included in the 1992 version of Dancing Girls
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "handmaids", women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
The scarlet ibis is a species of ibis in the bird family Threskiornithidae. It inhabits tropical South America and part of the Caribbean. In form, it resembles most of the other twenty-seven extant species of ibis, but its remarkably brilliant scarlet coloration makes it unmistakable. It is one of the two national birds of Trinidad and Tobago, and its Tupi–Guarani name, guará, is part of the name of several municipalities along the coast of Brazil.
"Bluebeard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of the present one to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word "Bluebeard" the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb "bluebearding" has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women.
Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988) is a 1987 novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut. It is told as a first-person narrative and describes the late years of fictional Abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, who first appeared as a minor character in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (1973). Circumstances of the novel bear rough resemblance to the fairy tale of Bluebeard popularized by Charles Perrault. Karabekian mentions this relationship once in the novel.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
"Unearthing Suite" is a short story by Margaret Atwood.
The Edible Woman is the first novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1969, which helped to establish Atwood as a prose writer of major significance. It is the story of a young woman, Marian, whose sane, structured, consumer-oriented world starts to slip out of focus. Following her engagement, Marian feels her body and her self are becoming separated. Marian begins endowing food with human qualities that cause her to identify with it, and finds herself unable to eat, repelled by metaphorical cannibalism. In a foreword written in 1979 for the Virago edition of the novel, Atwood described it as a protofeminist rather than feminist work.
Margaret St. Clair was an American fantasy and science fiction writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard.
Alias Grace is a historical fiction novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Canadian Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
"The Light-House" is the unofficial title of the last work written by Edgar Allan Poe. He did not live to finish it, and had barely begun it by the time of his death in 1849.
Surfacing is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Published by McClelland and Stewart in 1972, it was her second novel. Surfacing has been described by commentators as a companion novel to Atwood's collection of poems, Power Politics, which was written the previous year and deals with complementary issues.
The Penelopiad is a novella by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It was published in 2005 as part of the first set of books in the Canongate Myth Series where contemporary authors rewrite ancient myths. In The Penelopiad, Penelope reminisces on the events of the Odyssey, life in Hades, Odysseus, Helen of Troy, and her relationships with her parents. A Greek chorus of the twelve maids, who Odysseus believed were disloyal and whom Telemachus hanged, interrupt Penelope's narrative to express their view on events. The maids' interludes use a new genre each time, including a jump-rope rhyme, a lament, an idyll, a ballad, a lecture, a court trial and several types of songs.
"The Robber Bridegroom" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 40. Joseph Jacobs included a variant, Mr Fox, in English Fairy Tales, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare alludes to the Mr. Fox variant in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1:
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is a collection of short stories and poetry by English author Neil Gaiman. It was published in the US and UK in 2006 by HarperCollins and Headline Review.
"Rape Fantasies" is a short story by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The story, notable for its dark humor, was originally published in The Fiddlehead in 1975, and subsequently republished in Atwood's Dancing Girls & Other Stories in 1977, after being left out of the first edition. The story gained greater attention and study when it was later anthologized in the 1985 edition of Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
The Door is a book of poetry by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 2007.
Murder in the Dark is a collection of short fiction by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1983. Some of the pieces were previously published. The 27 pieces range over a variety of styles, including fictionalized autobiography, parables, travel stories, satires and prose poems. The pieces hold together through their major themes of loss, menace and terror, and men's abuse of power.
Seven Gothic Tales is a collection of short stories by the Danish author Karen Blixen, first published in 1934, three years before her memoir Out of Africa. The collection, consisting of stories set mostly in the nineteenth century, contains her tales "The Deluge at Norderney" and "The Supper at Elsinore".
“ My Life as a Bat by marly sendry ” is a 1,433-word short story first appearing in a collection of 27 short stories and prose poems by Canadian author Margaret Atwood titled Good Bones, published in 1992. The story is written in 1st Person point of view from the perspective of an unnamed, ungendered narrator who claims to have lived a previous life as a bat and to have been reincarnated as a human. It is organized into five titled subsections, each introducing a new topic, considered from the alternating points of view of the narrator as a human and as their former bat self, “a point of view at once soothingly familiar” because bats are a widely known animal “and freakishly alien” because they are so often viewed as darkly mysterious, even frightening. The story's primary subject is the atypical perspective that humans, not bats, are frightening, a “[wry] revising [of] cultural myths.