OMFG thank the mighty goddess that it is Friday. It is also Margaret Atwood's birthday. Did you know that she's on Twitter? In the interview above, she calls having followers on the social network "like having fairies in the bottom of your garden." Also celebrating birthdays: Christian Siriano, Fabolous, Chloë…
Is there anything Margaret Atwood doesn't do? She writes novels, she gives hockey advice
"So what's it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? [...] Let's just say it's communication, and communication is something human beings like to do." — Margaret Atwood. [Guardian]
This video proves what we've all long suspected — that The Mighty Ducks would have been way better if it starred Margaret Atwood. Next, could we have boxing tips from Joyce Carol Oates? [Salon]
"Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it." [CNN]
Ariel Levy recommends Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak and Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. We'd like to add Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. You? [The New Yorker]
The Guardian is worried that "if Margaret Atwood isn't sure she is a feminist anymore," feminists might be "an endangered species." But Atwood's take on the f-word is more complicated than the Guardian implies — and so is ours.
Alice Munro has taken her new collection "Too Much Happiness" out of the running for Canada's prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, which she's won twice before - thereby ending literary nerds' hopes for a showdown with Margaret Atwood. [NYT]
• Pro-government militiaman Abbas Kargar Javid has been accused of murdering Neda Soltan, the young woman from Iran who became an international symbol after her death was shown on YouTube. The regime has yet to take action against Javid. •
Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is going to be made into a documentary. Sources say the film "will probe how the metaphor of indebtedness has shaped societies over time." [THR]
Margaret Atwood: "It's like everyone's blogging about how they brushed their teeth this morning." [NYT]
• Governor Sarah Palin is speaking out against the "fantasies" published in the newly released "Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin." Her camp has accused author Lorenzo Benet of practicing "bad journalism." •
A Toronto father argues that inclusion of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on his son's reading list is a violation of schoolboard policy, citing the novel's "foul language, anti-Christian overtones, violence and sexual degradation." [Shameless]
As someone with a love of good feminist SciFi, I was saddened that NPR's review of Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North had to crack on the genre's archetype, The Handmaid's Tale, for not showcasing a violent uprising by the oppressed women but the plot summary and the excerpt provided are extremely intriguing. Hall's…
