Who Controls What Books You Can Read?
SOMEONE GAVE MARGARET Atwood a flamethrower.
The gray-haired author has become a patron saint for a certain kind of dystopian apocalypticism. No protest is complete these days without at least a few women in the red robes and white bonnets of The Handmaid’s Tale, her clouded portrait of an authoritarian society built around controlling conscience and fertility. “The Handmaid’s Tale has been banned many times—sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists,” Atwood notes, “sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries.”
All of which made her the perfect subject for a stunt to raise money for PEN America, a nonprofit that fights literary censorship: She took a blowtorch to a custom-made fireproof edition of her most
