Online Read Free Novel
  • Home
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    The Tent

    Page 7
    Prev Next


      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

      Good Bones

      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

      Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

      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

      FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007

      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

     

     

     



    Prev Next
Online Read Free Novel Copyright 2016 - 2025