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Also by Margaret Atwood:

Fourteen Days, June 2023
Hardcover
Burning Questions, March 2022
Hardcover / e-Book
The Heart Goes Last, October 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
Stone Mattress, September 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Maddaddam, January 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
In Other Worlds, October 2011
Hardcover
The Year of the Flood, October 2009
Hardcover
Payback, January 2009
Paperback
The Handmaid's Tale, October 2006
Hardcover / e-Book (reprint)
Moral Disorder, September 2006
Hardcover
Penelopiad, November 2005
Trade Size

Payback
Margaret Atwood

Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Anansi
January 2009
On Sale: December 30, 2008
230 pages
ISBN: 0887848109
EAN: 9780887848100
Paperback
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Non-Fiction

Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of debt - a timely subject during our current period of economic upheaval, caused by the collapse of a system of interlocking debts. In her wide ranging, entertaining, and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that debt is like air - something we take for granted until things go wrong. And then, while gasping for breath, we become very interested in it.

Payback is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon these subjects. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By investigating how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day through the stories we tell each other, through our concepts of "balance," "revenge," and "sin," and in the way we form our social relationships, Atwood shows that the idea of what we owe one another - in other words, "debt" - is built into the human imagination and is one of its most dynamic metaphors.

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