Atwood, Margaret

Canada’s best-known writer has a big brain and an unerring sense of what guys are playing with in their pockets. For reasons unknown, she’s become the first public figure ambitious assholes attack when decrying Canadian culture. When she was younger, she gave a credible impersonation of Miss Piggy whenever buzzed. More serene now, she merely writes decent novels filled with lucid if conventional English sentences and exudes acid-laced common sense in the face of incoming lunacies of all sorts. These are unfair questions to ask, but is Atwood a greater writer than, say, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer? What kind and quality of novels would she have written had she been born a white South African, a Czech, or simply twenty years later than she was?

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