The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
It’s a refrain of late to say that this—Margaret Atwood’s most famous book, now thirty-one years old—is suddenly relevant again. But of course the story, of a world in which women are forbidden from working or reading, forced into serving as incubators for wealthier women who cannot conceive, and prevented from so much as whispering against a system that reduces them to their wombs, says as much about the present and recent past as about any possible future. It’s harrowing to read today, as it was a decade ago, and a decade before that, and will be a decade from now. Some tales last a very long time.