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Stone Mattress: Nine tales by Margaret Atwood

by
November 2014, no. 366

Stone Mattress: Nine tales by Margaret Atwood

Bloomsbury, $35.99 hb, 268 pp

Stone Mattress: Nine tales by Margaret Atwood

by
November 2014, no. 366

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, as the stark proverb cautions, but a cockatoo flocking of short stories suggests that the form is perhaps enjoying a revival – and the publishing industry has seized an opportunity. As it should.

In 2013, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, lauded as ‘the master of the contemporary short story’. Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object appeared in 2013. New collections by luminaries Hilary Mantel (The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher) and Margaret Atwood have followed in 2014. And for aficionados of the form, there was the splendid brick (733 pages) of collected stories by the quirky American virtuoso of the form, Lydia Davis (do read her – she’s extraordinary), anticipating a trend when it was published by Picador in 2009.

Morag Fraser reviews 'Stone Mattress: Nine tales' by Margaret Atwood

Stone Mattress: Nine tales

by Margaret Atwood

Bloomsbury, $35.99 hb, 268 pp

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