Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales - Softcover

"Eclectic, funny, vibrant, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly delightful." --The Boston Globe

"A tour de force of wit, style, and discernment." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"Astonishing. . . . Powerful. . . . I loved these strange, sharp and wild stories." --Meg Wolitzer, NPR

"Pure, simple and stunning. . . . Endearing, subtle, quite brilliant." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Powerful. . . . Witty and frequently biting, Stone Mattress is keen to the ways in which we choose, all our lives, to love and to hurt--and in Atwood's world these two actions are always choices, creating consequences for which we will one day be held to account." --The New York Times Book Review

"[These] stories have the caustic wit and giddy deviance . . . along with the probing interiority and flinty insights of Atwood's novels." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Danc[es] over the dark swamps of Horror on the wings of satirical wit. . . . Look at these tales . . . as eight icily refreshing arsenic Popsicles followed by a baked Alaska laced with anthrax, all served with impeccable style and aplomb. Enjoy!" --Ursula K. Le Guin, Financial Times

"Stylish, acerbic and wickedly funny. . . . With wit, sympathy and precision, Atwood draws readers into a reflective frame of mind." --The Miami Herald

"The collection is surprisingly unsettling, gripping and at once laugh-out-loud hilarious. It attains its laudable goal: Myths last over time, and the stories in this book have that very quality. They are timeless, memorable and quite simply fun." --Chicago Tribune

"Absorbing. . . . Impressive. . . . Stone mattresses make for restless sleep, but in this elegant collection, everyone expresses that restlessness differently." --The A.V. Club

"Powerful. . . . Extraordinary. . . . Realism and ridiculousness, play and deadly seriousness, are held in fine balance throughout." --The Guardian (London)

"Wise and witty. . . . Atwood writes essentially intellectual fiction, spryly coiled around solid themes, yet borrowing the amusements of pulp genres, from science fiction to horror." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Compelling. . . . Astonishing. . . . Atwood illuminates heavy themes with a lightness of touch, giving insight not only into the nature of stone but the trials and tribulations of flesh and blood." --The Observer (London)

"A collection rich in sly humour and pulpy thrills." --The Telegraph (London)

"This collection of short stories is charged with a delightful cheekiness, as well as a full awareness of the subjectivity of notions of justice and value. . . . Witty, weird, chirpily irreverent, somewhat hard-hearted, and hugely insightful." --The Independent (London)

"[Atwood's] ability to surprise and her sparkling language are on full display. . . . Stone Mattress not only showcases its author's talents at their most refined, it also affords a glimpse behind the curtain to the woman working the megaphone." --The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Wickedly funny, mordantly observed ruminations on how the sexes interact. . . . With Stone Mattress, Atwood brilliantly returns to her literary roots as a deliciously funny observer of the human comedy." --The Toronto Star

Nine darkly humorous tales from one of today's greatest writers