“Gentlemen, the time has come. I will do my best for you. Are you listening?”

Oh hell, Mags. What else could I expect? Other than my heart in your hands?

Atwood’s newest collection of stories, released last year, is an exemplar of her storytelling range: explorations of grief and the fossilizations of love, aging delicately and loudly, arcane trickery, and, of course, a dystopian cautionary tale. Throw in an interview with the ghost of George Orwell and bing bang boom, we’re set! Oftentimes, I can put a story collection down, wait a while, come back and find I’ve completely forgotten what I had read previously. Not the case here, friends: every story, every word, clung to my bones.

Stand out stories included “Freeforall,” “Wooden Box,” “A Dusty Lunch,” and “My Evil Mother.” The reading of “Metempsychosis: Or, The Journey of the Soul” (read in a different anthology earlier this year) was, somehow, even better the second time around. These stories were much more introspective and personal than I’ve read from Atwood before, but nonetheless as fantastical and compelling as any other. This was a play-through album: not a skip in the bunch.

5/5 Atwood’s writing is the second of air between an ethereal, gauzy dream in front of the harsh fist of reality.