Still Blooming Every Summer

A list of Margaret Atwood’s “shorter fiction” appears before the title page of her newest book. While it helps to locate the volume within her oeuvre, it also confuses other attempts at categorization. “Eclectic fiction” might be an equally fitting way to describe the eight listed works. And such are the fifteen stories in Old Babes in the Wood : reminiscences and histories of varying length, forays into myth and the future, explorations of other species and other ways of knowing.

Divided into three sections and moving between first and third person, these stories visit an array of landscapes, each rendered in Atwood’s characteristically apt imagery: of aging cottages in northern Ontario, of a farmhouse in rural Provence, of ancient Egypt, of a snail’s musing soul. “My Evil Mother,” the middle section of eight stories, is a particularly eclectic mix that is held together by a...