Wiggity what?!

So many of my favorite authors are dead, or have early onset Alzheimer's, that it is super-exciting when a favorite author has a new book coming out.

Margaret Atwood's new novel The Year of the Flood will be released on September 22. Like her most recent novel, Oryx and Crake, Flood seems conceptually fascinating, and so well-written that I will want to speed through to find out what happens, and simultaneously slow down to savor the language.
Oh: and also like Oryx and Crake,Flood is about a dystopic near future in which mankind's godlike power over science and nature has whipped around and bitten him fatally in the ass. I guess there's a lot of story to get out of that setup.

To be fair to the hardworking Ms. Atwood, she has not been sitting idle since Oryx and Crake. No, since the publication of her last novel she published a nonfiction book about economics, Payback, that I did not read; she published a collection of short stories, Moral Disorder, that I did read; she even published a collection of poems, The Door, that I did not even know about until I looked on Amazon when I started writing this post. Also, my favorite Atwood book for many years was the collection of prose and poems and proems and what-not called Good Bones and Simple Murders, which I never ended up buying for myself. Apparently Amazon has used copies for as low as $.01, so maybe now would be a good time.

As a side note, I once named a dog after Margaret Atwood. Fittingly enough, the story is not a happy one. While I don't blame the name, if I had a do-over I might try naming the dog after A.A. Milne or something.

Milne: "'Oh, bother,' said Pooh."

Atwood (from The Door): "That's what I do:/ I tell dark stories/ before and after they come true."

And she does it so well, you know?