书名：The Handmaid’s Tale 使女的故事
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数750L
作者：Margaret Atwood玛格丽特·阿特伍德
出版社名称：Anchor
出版时间：2017
语种：英文
ISBN：9780525435006
商品尺寸：13.2 x 1.8 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：336

The Handmaid’s Tale《使女的故事》是玛格丽特·阿特伍德发表于1985年的经典作品，小说中探讨的女性生育自由、代孕、人口衰退、环境恶化等问题在特朗普时代的美国重又引发热议，媒体和公众纷纷宣称，“阿特伍德的小说正在成为现实”，该书甚至超越奥威尔，登顶亚马逊畅销书榜首。2017年4月，根据小说改编的同名剧集在Hulu电视网播出，瞬间成为全球热门话题，斩获艾美奖五项大奖，其热度还在不断发酵。《使女的故事》第二季已确定将于2018年4月首播。

推荐理由：
1.艾美奖年度剧集原著小说，女性版《1984》；
2.加拿大文学女王玛格丽特•阿特伍德代表作；
3.获英国布克奖、普罗米修斯奖、星云奖提名；
4.英文原版，内容无删减，含作者亲笔新版序言。

媒体评论：
“尽管《使女的故事》是一篇自传体式的小说，但卷入这一整套秩序的不仅仅是女性，而包括所有人。”——《澎湃新闻》

“《使女的故事》从历史的纵深处开掘，它延宕了对西方激进女性主义流派的批评，勾勒出女性史的脉络。”——《深焦》

“《使女的故事》并不仅仅是对未来的黑色预言，更是一次对历史和现实的疼痛反思。”——《观察者网》

“但到了2017年的时候，当我们抵达未来的时候，这一切却离我们更近了，变得更真实了。这里面的每一个人，几乎都能在现实中找到对应。”——荞麦（作家）
From the author of Alias Grace and the Maddaddam trilogy: here is the #1New York Times bestseller and seminal work of speculative fiction, now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, and Joseph Fiennes. Includes a new introduction by the author.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.... Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force.
Review
“Brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex.”  —The Washington Post 

“The Handmaid’s Tale deserves the highest praise.”  — San Francisco Chronicle

“Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions.... An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking.”  — Houston Chronicle

“Splendid.”  — Newsweek

奥芙弗雷德是基列共和国的一名使女。她是这个国家中为数不多能够生育的女性之一，被分配到没有后代的指挥官家庭，帮助他们生育子嗣。和这个国家里的其他女性一样，她没有行动的自由，被剥夺了财产、工作和阅读的权利。除了某些特殊的日子，使女们每天只被允许结伴外出一次购物，她们的一举一动都受到“眼目”的监视。更糟糕的是，在这个疯狂的世界里，人类不仅要面对生态恶化、经济危机等问题，还陷入了相互敌视、等级分化和肆意杀戮的混乱局面。女性并非这场浩劫中被压迫的对象，每个人都是这个看似荒诞的世界里的受害者。

被誉为“加拿大文学女王”的玛格丽特·阿特伍德是一位勤奋多产的作家，迄今已有14部诗集、11部长篇小说、5部短篇小说集和3部文学评论出版，并主编了《牛津加拿大英语诗歌》《牛津加拿大英语短篇小说》等文集，此外还撰写了不少广播、电视、戏剧、儿童文学作品等。她获得过除诺贝尔文学奖之外的几乎所有的国际文学奖和不计其数的其他奖励和荣誉，并被多伦多大学等十多所国内外大学授予荣誉博士学位，享有很高的国际声誉。她的作品已被译成30多种文字。2017年，阿特伍德获卡夫卡奖和德国书业和平奖。
Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam; and her most recent, The Heart Goes Last. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

from the Introduction
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid’s Tale. I wrote in long hand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter that I’d rented.
The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: the Soviet empire was still strongly in place and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German air force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain—Czechoslovakia, East Germany—I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. This used to belong to . . . But then they disappeared. I heard such stories many times.
Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. It can’t happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
By 1984, I’d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory, and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil.
Back in 1984, the main premise seemed—even to me—fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States of America had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: the Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the seventeenth-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.
The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)
In the novel, the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today’s real world, studies in China are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Under totalitarianisms—or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society—the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, twelve sons—but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.
And so the tale unfolds.