Margaret Atwood, blogger

Award-winning author Margaret Atwood ("The Handmaid's Tale") has jumped into the blogging arena. Atwood is one author who has embraced edgy Internet technologies in the past -- in 2008, she did several book signings remotely, using the robot-ish LongPen. Not that blogging is edgy anymore. But this is her first attempt.

The blog is called, helpfully, Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood -- the subtitle being the same as her new book. Due out Sept. 22, "The Year of the Flood" follows two women in a dystopia: one is a trapeze artist in a high-end sex club, the other a religious gardener barricaded in a luxury spa. Not sure how it plays out, but it sounds like a lusher, sexier end-of-the-world than "The Road."

You won't find much about the book on Atwood's blog, though; the blog focuses on her book tour. As she travels to England and back again, she's focusing on keeping green: offsetting carbon emissions when she has to fly, even bringing along shade-grown organic coffee beans. It's safe to guess that in her new book the disaster that leads to the dissolution of society is environmental.

She may also have depletion of the ozone layer on her mind, because snapshots show she's rarely caught bare-headed these days.

But maybe that's not about environmental concerns; maybe she simply has a fondness for big, floppy hats.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Margaret Atwood in 2000. Credit: Dylan Martinez / Reuters

Comments

[Steve Bryan]

The disaster that leads to the dystopian world of this novel is not a complete mystery if you read her previous novel, "Oryx and Crake". Reading that previous novel would be one way of passing the time until the new novel becomes available.