A new nonfiction book from legendary Canadian author Margaret Atwood is coming next year.
Doubleday will publish Atwood’s Burning Questions: Essays 2004-2021 in 2022, the press announced in a news release.
“In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds,” Doubleday says. “The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom, from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) and how to define granola, we have no better guide than Atwood to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.”
Questions addressed in the book, according to the publisher, include “How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?” and “What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?”
Burning Questions will be Atwood’s first nonfiction book since In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, which was published in 2011. Her most recent books are The Testaments, her 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and Dearly, a poetry collection published last year.
“It’s been a wild ride so far, the twenty-first century,” Atwood said. “Many of the questions that have been smoldering for decades have now burst into flames. Unless we can answer them, quickly and effectively, so will we.”
Burning Questions is slated for publication on March 1, 2022.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
