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“... scrub the floors no one will. Her letters find her in conversation with the giants of the time – Margaret Laurence’s letters are the most heartening and humane, and her mentor Hugh MacLennan’s the funniest. He’ll begin by telling Marian that the limbs of her sentences bleed and end by talking about the Nazis. ‘Without the study of fluvial ...”

“... princess of Corinth; in revenge Medea poisons Jason’s new bride (‘murder by toxic frock’, as Margaret Atwood calls it) and kills the children she’s had with him. Ovid, Seneca and Shakespeare all draw greedily from this cup of horrors. In spite of her virulence, the figure of Medea commands our attention – and our sympathy. Dante put Jason in the ...”

“... Prejudice. The book was enormously successful on its appearance in March 2003, winning praise from Margaret Atwood (‘All readers should read it’) and Susan Sontag (‘I was enthralled and moved’). It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 117 weeks and has been translated into 32 languages. Its popularity created a market for Iranian ...”

“... been of interest, he thinks, to modernist and postmodern writers from James Joyce to Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Chapters on the delight Dickens took in names and his use of coincidence demonstrate with equal conviction that technique can be a way of knowing the world.Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations ...”

“... than at Wembley, to say the least, though some critics there might quibble with its epigraph from Margaret Atwood: ‘Some people think that the word Nationalism means “let’s all put on jackboots and kill everybody else” but our cultural nationalism has a very modest mandate – namely, that we exist. It seems to threaten some people.’ A Scottish ...”

“... Ong on subway graffiti, and the section opens with a splendidly passionate and ambitious piece by Margaret Doody on the revision of the hymnal used by Princeton University Chapel, a booklet called ‘Inconclusive Language Hymns’ which is produced by the First Congregational Church. From here, Doody strikes out boldly into territory of wide aesthetic and ...”

“... by literary works is unsurpassable – revenants speaking directly to us. A few years ago, Margaret Atwood said that much of the business of writing engages writers in ‘negotiating with the dead’. The historians whose records of the past we remember and can relive in memory are usually storytellers above all: starting with Herodotus. For many ...”

“... most machines, he agreed to some long-distance signing of books using a strange device invented by Margaret Atwood called the Longpen, where he signed them on a tablet and a mechanical arm in Edinburgh followed his scrawl. He said he had fond memories of Edinburgh, having taken part in a famous literary scrap organised there in 1962 by John Calder. I ...”

“... art – ‘this outstanding novel clamours to be heard.’ ‘Essential reading for our time,’ Margaret Atwood proclaimed in a New York Times review of Snow, Pamuk’s grim, Dostoevskian thriller about Islamists and secularists clashing in north-eastern Turkey. (‘Headscarves to Die for’ was the headline.) Pamuk’s appeal has not been lost on ...”

“... to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead,’ Margaret Atwood suggested in her fine Empson Lectures. The aim is often redress, redress achieved through imaginative acts of memory, through exhuming the dead, as in Zong!, a remarkable prose-poem written in 2008 by M. NourbeSe Philip, which takes off from ...”

“... Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up questions of an appeal to different reading publics, as well as their ...”

“... Library’s list. Novelists with clear literary pedigrees now write SF regularly: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro. Authors who began inside the SF ghetto have found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to ...”

“... The Collected Poems at number six (in company with Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage and Margaret Atwood). The book was puffed as ‘the background to Peter Ackroyd’s best-selling biography’. The hike to Felpham, a dormitory of the living dead, was unremarkable. I understood why the journey took Blake 18 hours. There were moments, up on the ...”

“... inflation rocketed. HBO went for high-selling literary novelists, signing up Jeffrey Eugenides, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘HBO gained a reputation for going through pilots like Kleenex,’ Biskind writes.He estimates Amazon will have scant change from a billion dollars for its Rings of Power series, based on Tolkien’s lesser-known ...”

“... inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate’s series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, a harsh retelling in Penelope’s voice of the concluding scenes of the Odyssey. With her own special bite, Atwood singles out for dramatic treatment the girls who worked in the palace and ...”