About the Author: Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth  in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
Find the best price forStone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales
Margaret Atwood
Goodreads rating: 
Paperback, Published in Sep 2015 by Virago
ISBN10: 0349006539 | ISBN13: 9780349006536
Page count: 311
A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy.
A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire, and a crime committed long ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite.
In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.
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SocialBookCo User Reviews
Sarah Douglas on 08 Sep 2016
“My undying love of Margaret Atwood novels
When I signed up to SocialBookCo it asked me what would be my top 5 novels to review, and in there was Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood because I just love everything she writes - she's such a genius and I don't understand why people don't follow her around bowing at her feet because her books are so awesome. One of my favourite novels of all time is Oryx and Crake and so far I've not come across an Atwood novel I didn't like. I've enjoyed some more than others, but they all have something different and unique to offer. Her dystopian writings appeal to me most but it was also an interesting experience reading Alias Grace which is based on a real historical murder case. The Handmaid's Tale deserves a notable mention for also being so intelligently written and fascinating to read.
First thoughts on Stone Mattress
When the book arrived (sent from Wordery, which is a site I've shopped on before and they are very good), I was firstly pleased to see that the cover design matched my other Atwood novels (except for MadAddam, which, frustratingly, has a completely different paperback cover design -why would they do that??) so it'll look nice on the bookshelf.
The Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Stone Mattress is a series of nine short stories, and I've only read novels by Atwood before so this is something new. I wouldn't normally choose a book of short stories -I'm not sure why but it just doesn't appeal to me as much -but as soon as I started reading I knew I was going to like this book. The prose is very readable and features Atwood's usual level of wit and… and… I'm trying to think of a word here -you know when you read something and it's subtle but you just instantly think ha! that's just how it is in real life? Well I think there's a word for that but I can't remember what it is.
The stories
The first three tales are interlinked, telling the story of three different characters each looking back on an event in their lives from different perspectives. I had hoped all the stories would be linked somehow, in a Cloud Atlas kind of way, but that wasn't the case. Three of the tales have been published before in other places and the other six are new. One of them features the same characters that appear in The Robber Bride, which I've yet to read.
The subtitle of the book is 'Nine wicked tales' and they are rather murdery but in a fun way. As the term 'wicked' suggests. My favourite was probably 'Stone Mattress', for which the book itself is named, which centres on a revenge/murder plot out on a cruise in the Arctic. It sounds dramatic but it's written with Atwood's usual humorous light touch which means it's not heavy going. The others I really liked were 'The Freeze-Dried Groom' and 'The Dead Hand Loves You'. But all the tales were enjoyable to read as Atwood draws all her characters so acutely.
Apart from death and a bit of murder here and there, the other strong themes that emerged from the stories as a collection were ageing and memory, vision and hallucination (the blurred line between fantasy and reality) and a rather fun metatextual weaving of novels within stories.
Any bad bits?
Well, the copy I have seems to have rather too many typos in it for my liking, for which, working in publishing myself, I would blame the publisher not the author. Examples include p.23 'Aphinland' instead of 'Alphinland' and p.259 'splapdash' (though I quite like that one -perhaps it was deliberate). I also wasn't especially keen on the story 'Lusus Naturae' as the tone of it seemed quite different from the other stories and I didn't think it quite fitted, but that's not really a major criticism.
Summary
I'm not a fan of short stories so wouldn't normally have bought this (even though it is by the very brilliant Margaret Atwood) but I enjoyed reading it from start to finish and would happily read it again (and I don't say that about a lot of books). Each tale is well written, engaging and witty and the collection as a whole offers variety with some intelligent overarching themes to link them. I couldn't help but wish Atwood had taken each tale as the germ of an idea and expanded them into a full novels but that's just me being greedy I suspect!”