O BRAVE NEW PENITENTIARY

THE PROLIFIC AUTHOR, poet, and playwright Margaret Atwood first hit it big with The Handmaid’s Tale, her 1985 novel in which women are tightly controlled as reproductive vessels. Less known, perhaps, but no less richly rendered, is her MaddAddam trilogy, which culminated in 2013 and imagines civilization beset by a “waterless” flood—a man-made biological catastrophe. Atwood’s speculative worlds serve as portents for our own, even as her wry wit sweetens the bitter pill. She’s first and foremost a master storyteller, which is probably why, when Hogarth Press asked her to reinterpret a work by none other than William Shakespeare, she didn’t blink. Out in October, her novel Hag-Seed is spun from The Tempest, one of the Bard’s most enigmatic works. In the original, Prospero, an exiled duke and sorcerer, is stranded with his daughter, Miranda,