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To open the Fall 2013 season, Margaret Atwood, author of the Oryx and Crake trilogy, will be joined in conversation by novelist and columnist Carl Hiaasen, whose most recent work is the bestselling Bad Monkey.
MaddAddam continues the dystopian themes that characterize both Oryx and The Year of the Flood, in which Atwood creates a compelling fictional reality that forces her readers to reflect on the current issues of their own. In conversation with journalist and author Carl Hiaasen, Atwood will reflect upon the dystopian themes running through her recent work and look back on her remarkable career.
Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006.
Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long PenTM.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of twelve previous novels, including the best-selling Star Island, Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, and Lucky You, and four best-selling children's books, Chomp, Hoot, Flush, and Scat. His most recent work of nonfiction is The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport. He also writes a weekly column for The Miami Herald. 
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.
Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.
With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since.
Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
Hey. Who wants to know? 
Alice Hoffman, author of Survival Lessons, will chat with Ann Leary, author of The Good House on some of the life experiences that have led them to their current successes and what kinds of choices they've made for themselves along their individual journeys.
Praised by Toni Morrison as "..a major contribution to twenty-first century literature," Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers presented a tour de force of invention and careful detail. Now Alice, whose short fiction has been featured everywhere from the New York Times to The Kenyon Review, is releasing a volume of personal insights called Survival Lessons, which she says she wrote in order to remind herself of the beauty of life and the fact that even in the most adverse situations, a person still has choices to make.
Ann Leary, is the author of The Good House; An Innocent, A Broad; and Outtakes From a Marriage, an exceptional novel that is at turns hilarious and sobering. There's a scandal, some mysticism, babies, old houses, drinking, and desire—and a love story between two craggy sixty-somethings that's as real and sexy as you get.
