I’m a writer, reader, and lapsed user of substances who is fascinated by fictional work that describes characters’ changes in perception. These days, I alter my own perception by common means: caffeine, sugar, changes in sleep, and (too rarely!) exercise. As the parent of small children, in recent years, I have treasured bearing witness to the wild changes and developmental leaps that young brains experience without the help of any substance at all.
I love Margaret Atwood, and this book is arguably even more prophetic than The Handmaid’s Tale.
Atwood’s eponymous Crake hopes to improve the world with a pill that will “eliminate the external causes of death.” His solution, BlyssPluss, is one part narcotic, one part Viagra, and one part insidious tool of mass sterilization.
I find Atwood a delightful writer, at once wonderfully playful and unapologetically cynical. From a post-pandemic perspective, it’s tempting to call her a visionary.
By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE
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Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.
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Praise for Oryx and Crake:
'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous…
His brilliant, super-original, voice-driven stories have totally redefined not only how we write but also how a whole generation of teachers approaches the pedagogy of creative writing.
I recently taught his short story “Escape from Spiderhead” in a creative writing class and can confirm its excellence (as well as how much better it remains than its recent film adaptation).
The piece features half a dozen fictional drugs, including VerbaluceTM, which loosens the tongue and animates the verbal brain; DarkenfloxxTM, which drives the user toward violence and even suicide; and the as-yet-unnamed, not-yet-brought-to-market, ED289/290, which simulates a feeling of love.
**ESCAPE FROM SPIDERHEAD NOW STREAMING ON NETFLIX - STARRING CHRIS HEMSWORTH AND MILES TELLER** The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
If you haven’t read this book since high school, reread it! I’ll cheer you on.
At the risk of overusing the word "visionary" in this list, I often think—too often?—about this 1949 letter that Huxley wrote to George Orwell, in which he challenged the dystopian vision Orwell wrote in 1984.
“Within the next generation,” Huxley predicted, “...the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
This book makes this list, however, not because of Huxley or his correspondence but because of the delicious fictional drug he invented for it, soma, which has “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE. Read the dystopian classic that inspired the hit Sky TV series.
'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale.
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.
You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
Let’s stay in high school for a moment and revisit another of the classics we read back then: A Clockwork Orange.
Remember how appealing Burgess made his fictional, mind- and mood-altering beverage? You could drink “moloko-plus” straight or mix it into a cocktail: “milk plus something else… vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other vesches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to one...”
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
Winter Journeys is a story of music, memory, and imagination.
At summer’s end, Ilona Miller loses her job. Instead of adjusting her attitude and sending out resumes, she retreats into grief and paranoid imaginings by day and wanders the streets at night. A long-dormant alter ego awakes and prompts a…
I was an Alice fanatic when I was a kid. The only book I read more times than Alice in Wonderland was Alice Through the Looking Glass.
It is commonly thought that Carroll based his mind-altering substances (the bottle marked “Drink Me,” the cake labeled “Eat Me”) on opium or laudanum. However, according to scholars of Carroll’s work and life, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Like my own invented drug, Granadone, in my book, Carroll’s substances were pure fiction, and the alterations in perception that he wrote about were derived organically.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel by English author Lewis Carroll (the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson). It tells of a young girl named Alice, who falls through a rabbit hole into a subterranean fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children.
One of the best-known and most popular works of English-language fiction, its narrative, structure, characters and imagery have been enormously…
Camp counselor Cory Ansel is eighteen, aimless, and afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York when the father of one of her campers—a beleaguered, middle-aged pharmaceutical executive—offers her a childcare job, an NDA, and room and board on his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, Cory continues to tell herself she’s in charge—but her mother, Emer, senses otherwise. Her daughter seemingly having vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help that she alone is convinced she hears.
An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, this book is a novel about addiction and sex, family and independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld.
After a reclusive childhood within the dank walls of Haggard House, Adam Bolton, at the age of eleven, is finally allowed to attend the village school, providing he obeys his mother, Sarai's, injunction. Against all outward influence, he must: “Keep to the straight and…
Paper Dolls is the memoir of a girl who becomes a young woman in a passionate search for an enduring friendship. Deprived of her older sister, Tess Vanderveer, by the neediness of an Irish ghetto girl, Dove Delaney, Gwen also loses the friendship of Millie Dietz, the beautiful daughter of…
