A week from now on March 1st, 2022 the book will arrive on my Kindle and I am looking forward to reading it. “Burning Questions” collects sundry pieces the author has written (and sometimes spoken) since 2004.

In Margaret Atwood’s Essays and Speeches, Some Hazards of the Trade – The New York Times:

Some of the most memorable things in “Burning Questions” are simply stray comments that noodle their way into your mind. She writes, “When I first saw the term child molester in a newspaper, I though it said child mole-ster, a job available to children, in which they would be paid for collecting moles.” She writes about an early job in market research. She was skeptical about Pop-Tarts, “those breakfast confections made of two layers of flour product glued together like clamshells, with a blob of jam in the clam position,” because they (initially) kept exploding in the toaster. There’s an excellently bonkers essay, titled “Cat’s Robo-Cradle,” in which she posits a moral way to eliminate feral cats that decimate the bird population. She imagines robotic coyotes that will swallow the cats and remove them to an enclosed fun fair, where they can live out the rest of their lives playing with squeaky catnip toys.