From Booklist
Wit and wisdom are the essay's body and soul, and Atwood--shrewd, mischievous, and compelling--displays both in her masterful nonfiction. This substantial yet effervescent retrospective collection showcases Atwood as a zestful and discerning literary critic as she brilliantly assesses the work of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Elmore Leonard. She is also an insightful and valiant social critic, unflinchingly dissecting the impact of violent pornography, remembering her favorite wild places and tracking the ravages of acid rain, reconsidering a 1978 visit to Afghanistan, and taking issue with the post-9/11 mind-set. Atwood does, indeed, write with intent, that is, with intensity, resolve, and spirit, but for all her seriousness, she has a wickedly good time ferreting out contradictions and toppling shibboleths. And best of all are her pithy, hilarious, and touching personal essays about her family and life as a writer. Atwood has a uniquely enlivening voice and point of view, and this exhilarating volume will bolster her standing as a world-class writer of keen intellect and moxie. Donna Seaman
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Book Description
From one of the world’s most passionately engaged literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces written for great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood’s worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize–winning author’s reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell’s 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk’s Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood’s career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005 FROM THE PUBLISHER
From one of the world's most passionately engaged literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces written for great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize-winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Frothy, courtly occasional pieces from Booker-winning Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.). The Toronto-based novelist is a powerful booster of her fellow Canadian literati, whom Americans tend to lose in translation. Here, she showcases some of the reviews and comments published over the last two decades regarding important Canadian fiction-from Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, Lucy M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi to the lifetime achievements of Mordecai Richler and Carol Shields. Atwood scrutinizes them all. Other pieces describe writing her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, while living in west Berlin and banging "on a rented typewriter with a German keyboard," and her fascination with the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition, whose crew perished of lead poisoning while seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient. (She made a "literary pilgrimage" to Beechy Island to revisit the expedition's remains.) The reviews are less interesting, since Atwood writes only about books that she likes and admits to being a "stroker" (who rewards good performance) rather than a "spanker" (who punishes bad performance). A few autobiographical essays evoke her more prickly feminist side and will arrest the attention of her devout readers: "That Certain Thing Called the Girlfriend" proclaims women to be at least as interested in other women as in men, and "Laughter vs. Death," sparked by research she did for Bodily Harm, offers her appalled reflections on the pornography industry. In a playful review of Robin Robertson's Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, Atwood records her answer when a Mexican TV interviewer asked whether she considered herselffeminine: "What, at my age?" she blurted out. She also weighs in on Gabriel Garc'a Marquez, Antonia Fraser, Marina Warner, Angela Carter, H.G. Wells, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Atwood is always a gracious writer, stately and polished, though the public persona exemplified here is not nearly as fascinating as her darkly enigmatic literary side. For the die-hard fan.
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