BuzzFeed spoke with author Margaret Atwood about her new short story collection, Stone Mattress . Here are a few things we learned.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Margaret Atwood, the best-selling and world-renowned author of over 70 works of literature, just published a new collection of short stories in September titled Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. In true Atwood style, the collection covers a range of topics; there's love, death, starving artists, and even some vampires. Regardless of each storyline's outcome, the author's words are always cause for laughter, deep thought, and pure enjoyment.
The short story collection comes one year after Atwood completed her MaddAddam trilogy, which she published last September and was also picked up by HBO to be turned into a television series. The combination of Atwood's recent career moves leaves us wondering if there's anything she can't do. Our guess: No.
In the meantime, BuzzFeed had the chance to catch up with the author on the phone while she's busy globe-trotting and promoting Stone Mattress. Here's what she had to say:
1. Margaret Atwood was inspired to start writing short fiction again after taking a cruise around the Arctic — and the collection gets pretty "wacky."
Stone Mattress is your first short story collection since you published Moral Disorder back in 1996. What inspired you to get back into writing short fiction again?
Margaret Awood: Well I think probably the first one is the title story. I guess I wrote a couple of them earlier than that, but the title story really was written on a boat in the Arctic to amuse the fellow passengers. They were really interested in how you might murder somebody on a ship in the Arctic. I think they were a little too interested. So I started that, and I started reading it to those people. It wasn't finished by the time we finished the trip and they said they really wanted to know how it came out, so I finished it. Then it got published in the New Yorker so I sent them all an email telling them where they could read it. I actually received quite a lot of responses from people who were very keen on it.
So enough people liked it that you continued writing more short fiction?
MA: Yeah. My original idea was to put together all the somewhat wacky stories that I had written but some of them were too short; I didn't include them. But I did include the one in which the family of the girl puts her out of sight because they're afraid that it will influence their other daughters' chances of getting married.
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