Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.(Literature)(Book Review)

Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 219 pp. $18.00 cloth.

In a recent cartoon in The New Yorker, a serious, bespectacled male character, nattily dressed in a pin-stripe suit, announces to a female companion at a cocktail party: "I don't usually tell people I'm a writer because I've never actually written anything" (17/24 June 2002, 14). This cartoon, while focusing on a certain presumption about the act of writing, its "potential lack of authenticity" (Negotiating, 51), also obliquely ...

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