{"product_id":"the-handmaids-tale-movie-tiein-isbn-9780525435006","title":"The Handmaid's Tale (Movie Tie-in)","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER \u003cb\u003e•\u003c\/b\u003e An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e) • The sixth and final season of the award-winning Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss is now streaming • \u003cb\u003eIncludes an introduction by Margaret Atwood \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, \u003ci\u003eThe Handmaid’s Tale\u003c\/i\u003e is a modern classic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLook for \u003ci\u003eThe Testaments\u003c\/i\u003e, the sequel to \u003ci\u003eThe Handmaid’s Tale\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Handmaid's Tale\u003c\/i\u003e deserves the highest praise.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions. . . . An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking.\" —\u003ci\u003eHouston Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Splendid.\" —\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMargaret   Atwood\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of more than fifty books of fiction,   poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s   Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The   Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel,   The Testaments, which   was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she   published Dearly, her   first collection of poetry for a decade.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for   Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of   the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton   Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the   Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a   cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in   Toronto, Canada.\u003cb\u003efrom the Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called \u003ci\u003eThe Handmaid’s Tale\u003c\/i\u003e. I wrote in long hand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter that I’d rented.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: the Soviet empire was still strongly in place and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German air force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain—Czechoslovakia, East Germany—I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. \u003ci\u003eThis used to belong to . . . But then they disappeared. \u003c\/i\u003eI heard such stories many times.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. \u003ci\u003eIt can’t happen here \u003c\/i\u003ecould not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e By 1984, I’d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory, and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Back in 1984, the main premise seemed—even to me—fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States of America had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: the Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the seventeenth-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In the novel, the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today’s real world, studies in China are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Under totalitarianisms—or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society—the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, twelve sons—but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e And so the tale unfolds.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303405408485,"sku":"NP9780525435006","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525435006.jpg?v=1767739703","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-handmaids-tale-movie-tiein-isbn-9780525435006","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}