Hi, I'm Kia Miyaka-Nates and this is NPR's Book of the Day.

Today we're chatting with a very well-known name in the book world, Margaret Atwood.

She's back with a new collection of short stories titled Old Babes in the Wood.

The tales range from a seance with George Orwell to a story that flips the plot of one of her most popular books,

Handmaid's tale, on its head. What if men were the gender that needed to be controlled?

NPR's Layla Faddle talks with Atwood about telling stories of people at their worst, and also, sometimes, at their best.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show,

Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

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Margaret Atwood has always been a keen observer of life.

Writing is what we do, and storytelling is what human beings do, and every single person that you will ever meet has got a story of my life, which they're constantly revising.

In her new short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, Atwood has characters modeled after herself

and her late husband. She also writes of the fantastical. Her story titled Free For All has

parallels to perhaps her best-known work adapted into a TV series The Handmaid's Tale.

It is a kind of companion piece to Handmaid, so flip it over and see what it would be like if it were, in fact, men who had to be controlled in their personal lives for their own good, of course.

If you could break down that story a little bit, so it's a killer disease.

A killer sexually transmitted

disease. So this is written right in the middle of the first wave of AIDS. And the solution

that society has come up with is you would have to have arranged marriages and you would have to

...