Stone Mattress — Margaret Atwood

In this extraordinary collection, Margaret Atwood gives us nine unforgettable tales that reveal the grotesque, delightfully wicked facets of humanity. “Alphinland,” the first of three loosely linked tales, introduces us to a fantasy writer who is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. In “Lusus Naturae,” a young woman, monstrously transformed by a genetic defect, is mistaken for a vampire. And in the title story, a woman who has killed four husbands discovers an opportunity to exact vengeance on the first man who ever wronged her.

By turns thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking, "Stone Mattress" affirms Atwood as our greatest creator of worlds -- and as an incisive chronicler of our darkest impulses.