Margaret Atwood & The Blind Assassin

She's good isn't she?

Yes, yes and she writes so well that it depresses me and makes it hard to keep writing.
What I love are her intelligence, her insights about people and her ideas and the way she can combine them.

overboard

Descriptions, I think, are best in moderation. After a point, I couldn't read that book any more. It was more about her showing off than telling a damn story. Save some of that stuff for other novels. It was an intriguing story, but I'll never know how it ends. Oh, well.

I enjoyed her recent Oryx and Crake.

I became a devoted fan of Margaret Atwood after reading Cat's Eye. The Blind Assasin is the only one of her books that I did struggle with. I am currently rereading, Surfacing. And her short story collections are my constant companions when I travel. One of the reasons I think I find myself continually rereading her work is that it takes me forever to get through her work. It's very cliche' but it's like I take two-steps forward and three steps back when I read her books--I keep going back to reread some of the stunning sentences she so deftly crafts.

Like this sentence from Surfacing. . .

Loon voices in the distance; bats flatter past us, dipping over the water surface, flat calm now, the shore things, white-gray rocks and dead trees, doubling themselves in the dark mirror.

Atwood will be a Summer Literary Series writer-in-residence this summer in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is also this year's fiction judge for the contest affiliated with the Summer Literary Series. Deadline for entry is only a week away---February 28th, and of course she won't be reading all the manuscripts that are submitted--most likely only receiving those manuscripts that have been pre-screened by other faculty members and writers affiliated with organizing the Summer Literary Series.

http://www.sumlitsem.org/russia/contests.aspx

Can you imagine even getting an honorable mention kudo from Margaret Atwood


Traveling to St. Petersburg is out of my budget range for a writer's workshop, but relatively speaking I didn't mind the $10 reading fee. Margaret Atwood inspires me to always strive for my personal best, and that's exactly what I did when I submitted an excerpt from my WIP. No way I can ever loose--in my eyes--when I know I've done my personal best

I love Margaret Atwood's work. A Handmaid's Tale is one of my all-time favorite books. She's wonderful at evoking mood so strongly that I get completely lost in her story.

I'm another one who couldn't get into The Blind Assassin (the only other book of hers I've read is The Handmaid's Tale). I think I put it down after about 60 pages. I like Atwood's prose style, but the story-to-word ratio wasn't high enough for me, I think. My wife reads all her books.

MTF

i am a big Atwood fan. The Handmaid's Tale made a huge impression on me. Cats Eyeis one of the best studies of childish cruelty I have ever read. It wanders storywise, but it is still and excellent read.

I had trouble with The Blind Assassin. It seemed tedious to me. I read Surfacing in a Lit class and must confess that I would not have finished it without the guidance of the teacher. Yes, the language is stunnig, but it seemed turgid and even opaque to me.

jen.nifer said:

I'm glad I started this thread! I'm finding everyone's replies so interesting...

JAlpha, thanking you kindly for that information. If I was ready, I would have loved to enter that competition. How does one keep informed of such contests?

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You are welcome, jen.nifer

As for how I keep informed about writing contests, for one example, Moira Richards (The Contest Editor) for AW's Premium Newsletter does a great job with contest listings. I check her column regularly.

Actually, there are so many other great sources too, that even just performing regular Google searches will keep you quite busy on the contest front. The trick is not in finding the contests, but in organizing the plethora of great contest info out there.

A couple of years ago, I bought an accordion file with 13 compartments. I labeled each section by month and the last compartment was labeled as "to be filed". That way, as I find contest information, I can always manage to get it into the file ASAP and keep up with pending deadlines for submissions.

I'm one of the many. I liked The Handmaid's Tale, and loved Oryx and Crake. The Blind Assassin's story within a story, dancing through different timelines is a fascinating study in the writer's craft, but Atwood seems (I'm still reading) to have fallen in love with her own words. She uses far too much description here - seemingly endless lists of French phrases, not just the colors of ladies dresses, but of their entire wardrobe - page after page where the story goes nowhere. This is not her best work. But she is a master, so it's still far better than most of what's out there.

I'm currently about to go chug green tea in a coffee shop and read as much of Alias Grace as I can before the knot that develops in my back forces me to stand up and do something else.


Anyone check out her book of essays?

I love her autobiography: "I"

Her books make me grieve for all the trees that died to print them.

I used to be a big Atwood fan. I especially love Cat's Eye and her short-story collections. I haven't read Oryx & Crake and don't really have any desire to do so.

I'm not aware of any autobiographies. I know there was at least one biography, but nothing she wrote herself.