MARGARET ATWOOD & HARIS VLAVIANOS
THE STORIES WE BRING BACK
French Paperback, Ebook
Extent: 72 pages
Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm
9781967751785 (PB)
9781967751792 (Ebook)
Price: $19.99 (PB)
In person, Atwood is much as one might expect from reading her work—incisive.
—The Paris Review
In this wide-ranging and fearless exchange, Margaret Atwood sits down in Athens with the poet and historian Haris Vlavianos to reflect on myth, politics, mortality, and the creative imagination. From Homer to The Handmaid’s Tale, from Tiresias to Trump, their conversation traces the long arc between ancient story and present crisis—how power is told, retold, and resisted. With sardonic humour and precision, Atwood revisits her own work through the eyes of myth: Penelope and her maids, sirens and shapeshifters, prophets and tyrants. Each theme turns back to a single question: What stories survive, and what do we bring back from the descent?
As the dialogue unfolds, Atwood speaks with unusual intimacy about the practice of writing: its rituals and terrors, its moral weight, its comic absurdities. The result is both a public conversation and a private meditation—a spirited encounter between two minds steeped in literature and alive to the political urgencies of our time.
At once erudite and mischievous, the dialogue reveals Atwood at her most lucid and unguarded. Part mythological symposium, part masterclass, part political reckoning, this book is about the endurance of art and the stubborn hope that every act of storytelling, even in an age of noise and tyranny, remains “an act of optimism.”