Stone Mattress

I won't deny that I've had a giant crush on Atwood's writing since I was in high school. I love her novels, but for me, her short stories are really where it's at. You can see her evolving concerns and her evolution as a writer. Stone Mattress doesn't disappoint– the first three short stories are interconnected, and the others are all stand alone. The subject matter is a little eclectic (a werewolf, a couple of murderers, some writers, and a lot of old people), but you can see her current preoccupations. Save one or two, all of her protagonists are older– 60s at the youngest, and the stories deal with memory and death. There's also a weird undercurrent of ambivalence about her own ability to balance the literary/genre divide. Genre fiction comes up a lot, and is often derided by characters or the narrative as “trashy” and not to be paid attention to, and the fans of genre are made out by the narrative to be strange and overwhelmingly obsessed while Atwood still utilizes conventions from those genres. In all, it's an Atwood book, it's well-written, with a deft insight into the human psyche, and also a lot of fun to read.