Writing with Intent : Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005

From one of the world's most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize — winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale . Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

From one of the world’s most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood’s worldview as the world around her changes.

Included are the Booker Prize–winning author’s reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell’s 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk’s Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her “Letter to America,” written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood’s career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

Kirkus Reviews

Frothy, courtly occasional pieces from Booker-winning Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.). The Toronto-based novelist is a powerful booster of her fellow Canadian literati, whom Americans tend to lose in translation. Here, she showcases some of the reviews and comments published over the last two decades regarding important Canadian fiction-from Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, Lucy M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi to the lifetime achievements of Mordecai Richler and Carol Shields. Atwood scrutinizes them all. Other pieces describe writing her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, while living in west Berlin and banging on a rented typewriter with a German keyboard, and her fascination with the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition, whose crew perished of lead poisoning while seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. (She made a literary pilgrimage to Beechy Island to revisit the expedition's remains.) The reviews are less interesting, since Atwood writes only about books that she likes and admits to being a stroker (who rewards good performance) rather than a spanker (who punishes bad performance). A few autobiographical essays evoke her more prickly feminist side and will arrest the attention of her devout readers: That Certain Thing Called the Girlfriend proclaims women to be at least as interested in other women as in men, and Laughter vs. Death, sparked by research she did for Bodily Harm, offers her appalled reflections on the pornography industry. In a playful review of Robin Robertson's Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, Atwood records her answer when a Mexican TV interviewer asked whether she considered herselffeminine: What, at my age? she blurted out. She also weighs in on Gabriel Garc'a Marquez, Antonia Fraser, Marina Warner, Angela Carter, H.G. Wells, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Atwood is always a gracious writer, stately and polished, though the public persona exemplified here is not nearly as fascinating as her darkly enigmatic literary side. For the die-hard fan.

"From one of our most passionately engaged global literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection ever assembled of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, spanning 1983-2005. The fifty-eight essays compiled here are written in a bracing voice that is provocative, witty, often colloquial, and always accessible. Comprised of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book and film reviews, eulogies, introductions written for great works of literature, and literary excursions that explore the writing of several of her own novels, this is Atwood's first essay collection in more than two decades, showing that whether writing fiction or nonfiction, she is one of the most probing thinkers in the world of letters today." "Compiled here are the Booker Prize-winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elmore Leonard, Angela Carter, Beryl Bainbridge, Dashiell Hammett, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Alice McDermott, as well as essays in which she recalls reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and a piece that examines the influence of George Orwell's work on The Handmaid's Tale. Here is Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller in 2004, a look back at a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001"--Jacket The first collection of nonfiction work by the author in more than two decades features fifty-seven essays and reviews on a wide range of topics, including John Updike, Toni Morrison, grunge, September 11th, and Gabriel Garc��a M��rquez, among others. The first collection of nonfiction work by the author in more than two decades features fifty-seven essays and reviews on a wide range of topics, including John Updike, Toni Morrison, grunge, September 11th, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others