Written by Margaret Atwood - Performed by Helen Shaver - Fiction - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell (December 1991)

Some writers have moments when they change the way we look at ourselves and the world, but Margaret Atwood does this all the time. In this selection of stories from her magnificent collection of new work, read by acclaimed actress Helen Shaver, she tells us tales that take us to familiar, strange, and secret places of the imagination.

Margaret Atwood is an incomparable observer, of both the many textures of contemporary life and the logic of irrational behavior. In "Hack Wednesday" a columnist balances the turmoil of the news—and the newsroom where she works—against the hope and comfort of her domestic life. "Wilderness Tips" maps the perilous territories of family relationships and infidelity. A grotesque act of revenge for love betrayed is made all the sweeter for being wrapped in a truffle in "Hairball." A teenage boy at summer camp learns to rough it over the rocky terrain of his adolescent desire for a forbidden town girl in "True Trash.”

Wilderness Tips is rich, alarming, satisfying: it is Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.