At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they'll come up, you have faith in that, and they'll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn't know what they were - some sort of little bulb - but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren't in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.
Acknowledgements
Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:
"Our Cat Enters Heaven" in Brick; "Warlords" and "Voice" in The Walrus; "Take Charge," "King Log in Exile," "Salome Was a Dancer," and "Post-Colonial" in Daedalus; "Life Stories" and "Resources of the Ikarians" in Short Story; and "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" and "The Tent" in Harper's Magazine.
In addition, "Bottle," "It's Not Easy Being Half-Divine," and an earlier version of "Nightingale" appeared in a limited-edition booklet published in aid of the Harbourfront Reading Series; these three and "Take Charge," "King Log in Exile," "Thylacine Ragout," "Post-Colonial," "Faster," and "Bottle II" were published in a limited-edition booklet called Bottle, in aid of the Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales; "Tree Baby," "But It Could Still," and "Something Has Happened" appeared in New Beginnings, an anthology published in support of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake charities; "Bottle" appeared in a German-language literary advent calendar called Das Geschenk; and "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" was auctioned in a holograph-illustrated edition of one, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund.
Books by Margaret Atwood
FICTION
The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Lady Oracle
Dancing Girls
Life Before Man
Bodily Harm
Murder in the Dark
Bluebeard's Egg
The Handmaid's Tale
Cat's Eye
Wilderness Tips
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Oryx and Crake
The Penelopiad
The Tent
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) For the Birds
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
NONFICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Days of the Rebels 1815-1840
Second Words
Negotiating with the Dead:
A Writer on Writing
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005
POETRY
Double Persephone
The Circle Game
The Animals in That Country
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Procedures for Underground
Power Politics
You Are Happy
Selected Poems
Two-Headed Poems
True Stories
Interlunar
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986
Morning in the Burned House
Copyright (c) 2006 by O.W. Toad, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-
The tent / Margaret Atwood--1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR9199.3.A8T46 2006
813'.54--dc22 2005043729
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-30738694-6
v3.0