Wilderness Tips - Hardcover

Atwood, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385421060 ISBN 13: 9780385421065

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1991

Synopsis

Here are brilliantly rendered stories that explore themes of loss and discovery, of the gap between youthful dreams and mature reality, of how we connect with others and with the sometimes hidden part of ourselves.

In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. By superimposing the past on the present Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery. Richly layered and disturbing, poignant at times and scathingly witty at others, the stories in Wilderness Tips take us into the strange and secret places of the heart and inform the familiar world in which we live with truths that cut to the bone.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Dazzling"
--The New York Times

"Atwood's voice, honed after writing such books as Lady Oracle and The Handmaid's Tale, is sharper than ever, but still funny...It whispers that the wilderness is right here, right now."
--San Francisco Chronicle

From the Back Cover:

“Each of the stories in Wilderness Tips is a gem, a glittering piece to which one is drawn again and again.”
– The Denver Post

“A solace in the midst of life’s losses and confusions–reason enough to celebrate once again Margaret Atwood’s singular gifts.”
– Maclean’s

“ Wilderness Tips is vintage stuff: the author is at her satiric, terse, biting and disturbing best in these ten stories.”
– Edmonton Journal

“This is masterful writing.”
– Globe and Mail

“Atwood is as audacious as ever.…There is something irresistible about this combination of mordant humour and unswerving truth.”
– Winnipeg Free Press

“[Atwood possesses] a truly remarkable array of powers.…The wilderness of Wilderness Tips is the one we all live in–whether or not we admit it.”
– Books in Canada

“These are stories that speak to all who do not close their ears, and their minds, to the late twentieth-century reality.”
– StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

“Virtuoso wit and unmistakable style.…Atwood the poet is alive in these stories.”
– Chicago Tribune.

“The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people’s emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imagination.”
– Publishers Weekly

“[Atwood has the] ability to place her finger firmly on the pulse of what is contemporary.”
– Hamilton Spectator

“ Wilderness Tips is a grimly comic, often scathing natural history of urban anxiety and middle age.”
– London Free Press

“Almost every one of the ten stories in this collection superimposes the past upon the present in an unsettling, often startling manner, which conjures up a sense of the mysterious, in even the most banal relationships.”
– New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0385421060
• ISBN 13: 9780385421065
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 227