What to read by Margaret Atwood after you've reread A Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood is one of the authors who is rewriting Shakespeare's plays for the "Hogarth Shakespeare'" collection. Her novel, Hag-Seed, is a r-imagining of Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. Unlike some of the plays in the series so far (I'm thinking of Jeanette Winterson's luminous retelling of The Winter's Tale, Gap of Time), The Tempest is a play that's been re-imagined mamy, many times, most recently in Julie (The Lion King) Taymor's version with Helen Mirren as "Prospera." 

All of Shakespeare's plays are full of quotable lines, but my very favorite exchange in all of Shakespeare is a conversation between Prospero and Caliban. "You taught me language," Caliban says to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse." I've seen about half a dozen performances of the play, including one stunning version mounted by Ellis Rabb and another starring Anthony Hopkins as Prospero. (Stephanie Zimbalist played Miranda.) 

I'm looking forward to reading Atwood's "take" on the tale because the books I've read so far have been terrific.  I'm especially looking forward to Nesbo's Macbeth, which is one of my favorite plays, despite its reputation for being a cursed piece of work.

Other books will be published over the next four years, including Jo Nesbo's version of Macbeth and Gillian Flynn's Hamlet. Tracy Chevalier's Othello re-do will be out this fall. I already have Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew) and Howard Jacobson's Shylock is My Name (The Merchant of Venice).

i'm surious how much of a feminist take on the play Hag-Seed will have. One of the things that has always bothered me about The Tempest is the way Prospero stole the island from Caliban's mother, the witch Sycorax.

Mary Kubica's Don't You Cry

I read for a living and one of the best books I read this year is Mary Kubica's novel, The Good Girl. I LOVED it. And I am delighted that she's written a number of books I haven't read yet. First up on my TBR queue is Don't You Cry, a psychological thriller that critics have (perhaps inevitably) compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. I liked Gone Girl well enough but I guessed the twist right away and I really didn't care for any of the characters--didn't think they were sympathetic. On the other hand, I liked the people in The Good Girl.

Feminist Fiction Friday--bits and pieces

There's still time to get in on Patti Abbott's "drabble contest." She supplies the prompts, you write a story in exactly 100 words.

Huzzah--Gillian Flynn has a new book out. Gone Girl. About a marriage gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Coming at the end of the month is a debut novel called The Age of Miracles by  Karen Thompson Walker. It's a combinatin of science fiction, thriller and coming of age story. 

in July, there will be another entry in Tana French's excellent Dublin Murder Squad series. It's called Broken Harbor.