-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Nine Tales
by Margaret Atwood
Book Reviewed by:Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships.
Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace.
A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in "Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In "The Freeze-Dried Bridegroom," a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence.
And in "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.
From the simply adequate to the most superb, Stone Mattress is an admirable, off-kilter study of death, love and vulnerability - often all three. Within these pages we are reminded of our own rapidly approaching mortality and, against all odds, see our desire to be loved in the strangest of tales...continued
Full Review
(507 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Lucy Rock).
A "stone mattress" in the titular tale of this short story collection serves as a painful reminder of past events. It is also Margaret Atwood's nickname for fascinating geological formations called stromatolites.
Stromatolites (from the Greek 'stroma' = mattress/layer and 'lithos' = stone) are most easily described as living fossils. Blue-green algae, a type of cyanobacteria, trap the sediment around it with its sticky coating. The algae absorb both carbon dioxide and calcium dissolved in water, which then react to form calcium carbonate, which provides a limestone scaffolding for further expansion. This is a hugely lengthy process (it can take a stromatolite 100 years to grow just 5 cm) that eventually results in rock-like ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Stone Mattress, try these:
by Michael Knight
Published 2018
These stories, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward.
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Published 2017
An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time.
.gif)