Spanning almost 20 years of writing, from 2004 onwards, Burning Questions is Margaret Atwood’s third e-book of essays and miscellaneous writing, all of which, she notes within the introduction, have been “tightly linked to their very own time and place”. Why the title? “Presumably as a result of the questions we’ve been confronted with to this point within the twenty first century are greater than pressing. All ages thinks that about its personal crises, after all, however certainly this period feels totally different. First, the planet. Is the world itself actually burning up? Is it we who’ve been setting fireplace to it? Can we put these fires out?”
Atwood is joined by a forged of narrators together with the actor Ciarán Hinds, who reads Frozen in Time, Atwood’s introduction to the eponymous e-book by Owen Beattie and John Geiger in regards to the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845. The Energy creator Naomi Alderman narrates The best way to Change the World?, which ponders the facility of people to find out the way forward for the planet. In the meantime, the actor Ann Dowd reads Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale, in regards to the genesis of Atwood’s most well-known novel, recalling the way it was “dissed” by some reviewers, together with the author Mary McCarthy. Atwood took it in her stride – largely. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, although it additionally typically makes you peevish.”
Elsewhere, there are tributes to fellow writers together with Ursula Ok Le Guin, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, and meditations on Donald Trump, tarot, Shakespeare, censorship, zombies and Laurie Anderson’s Massive Science album. Reflecting on the latter, as learn by Yvonne Boyer, Atwood urges us to “Have a hear. Confront the pressing questions. Really feel the chilliness.”
Burning Questions is on the market by way of Penguin Audio, 19hr 1min
Additional listening
The Final Kingdom
Bernard Cornwell, HarperCollins, 13hr 28min
Jonathan Keeble reads the primary of the Final Kingdom sequence about an epic energy battle between rival English kings, seen via the eyes of an orphan named Uhtred.
The State of Us
Jon Snow, Penguin Audio, 6hr 39min
The previous Channel 4 Information presenter seems to be again on his profession in journalism whereas taking the political temperature of the nation.
