Good Bones, Simple Murders & the Tent

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard

In Good Bones and Simple Murders, Margaret Atwood displays, in condensed and crystallized form, the trademark wit and virtuosity of her best-selling novels.

Among the jewels gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got Dracula all wrong, and the five methods of making a man. There are parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, and other miniature masterpieces.

In The Tent, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian essays speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.

©1994 Margaret Atwood (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Lots of Stories in this Collection

Although I didn’t love every single story, I did love most of them. Among my favorites were these excellent examples of Margaret Atwood’s humor and politics, which I like very much indeed.
*There Was Once
*Happy Endings
*Liking Men
*Homelanding
*Winter’s Tales
*Our Cat Enters Heaven
*Chicken Little Goes Too Far
*The Animals Reject Their Names And Things Return To Their Origins
*Post Colonial
*Heritage

Margaret Antwood’s worst

I have never been this BORED listening to a short story collection. Awful stories, some boring, some just plain bad.

This is enjoyable

The other reviews I saw on here don’t do this little collection justice. I enjoyed this quite a lot. I loved the micro nature of the stories, like miniature paintings including as much story and world-building as possible on the smallest canvas. Some of the stories made me laugh out loud, some made me think deeper. I like how it felt like a journal of ideas and how you can see Atwood as a master of her craft testing these ideas and how much life they have, and these were better off this way. The 2 short Hamlet-inspired stories went well with my Hamlet readathon, which is way this book ended up on my radar. You will enjoy this book if you aren’t looking for every short story to be an itty bitty Handmade’s Tale.

Disappointed

Not what I expect from Atwood. I want a real story line and character development.