On this week's selected shorts, we dedicated the entire hour to the great Margaret Atwood.

The episode features part of a conversation between Atwood and novelist A.M. Holmes recorded at our live show at Symphony Space.

As promised, here is the extended interview. They talk about everything from feminism, time,

writing, and dystopian fiction to Atwood's new short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood.

The collection has it all. It explores terrifying futuristic visions, whimsical fantasies, and realistic depictions of marriage.

In the heartbreaking story Widows, performed in the

program by Ellen Burstyn, Atwood revisits characters Nell and Tig, a couple featured in several

Atwood collections in the form of a letter after Tig has died. Now here's Margaret Atwood and

A.M. Holmes. There is about this book a melancholia that feels deep and serious and

not different because it's through everything. But hearing you go back to these characters,

this couple, is both beautiful and kind of heartbreaking. One of my questions that I had it sort of phrased

in a different way is I want to ask you about time. And has time changed for you, both as you've

gotten older in the sense that people can live in multiple times simultaneously?

No older you, dear. Old, actually. I know. I'm faking it pretty well, but I'm pretty old.

No, you're not.

On the same age as the year I was born, I'm 61. That's for me. I thought I was never going to get past

15, so, you know. Yes, I didn't think I was going to get past 30. We all have these things. But you know, if Keith Richard can do it,

we can do it, right? Anyway, yes, so you're a mere child. I'm just telling you that. Of course,

time changes, but it changes for everyone. So this is just something as human beings. Should we be so lucky, we all move

through. Do you feel, though, in terms of both in your sort of lived experience and in your

fiction, that the way that you experience and use time, like I think more and more about time existing,

and people and experiences, sort of on multiple platforms simultaneously, that we can be here and in the

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