SOURCE: “Scarlet Ibises and Frog Songs: Short Fiction,” in Margaret Atwood Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1999, pp. 125–44.

In the following essay, Stein offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Atwood's short fiction.

Atwood's stories combine realism and whimsy, fairy tale, myth, and fantasy as they represent the lives of contemporary women and men struggling to cope with an often puzzling or difficult world. Many of the stories contain striking symbols that stand in dramatic counterpoint to the routine or dulled lives of the characters. These short fictions explore a range of situations, from playful or provocative meditations on language and on women's bodies to examinations of our darkest fears. Atwood is especially interested in the fictions characters invent about their lives and in the ways that these stories may become traps or self-fulfilling prophecies or may be rewritten to offer new possibility. Dramatic symbols drawn from the world of nature...