SOLD OUT – Bill’s Book Café: The Handmaid’s Tale

with Bill Ptacek and Shelley Youngblut

Friday, Jan. 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
2nd Floor, Memorial Park Library, 1221 2 St SW, Calgary

RSVP Required / NOW SOLD OUT

Join Calgary Public Library CEO, Bill Ptacek, and Wordfest General Director, Shelley Youngblut, for a lively discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Read the book and come prepared for a rich and engaging conversation about the prescience of Atwood’s dystopian novel in a post-Trump world. This is NOT your mother’s book club. RSVP required / cash bar available.

About The Handmaid’s Tale

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time. The novel has since been adapted several times into radio plays, stage productions, ballet and opera performances as well as a 1990 feature film based on a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. The American video streaming service Hulu is slated to produce a 10-episode TV series based on the novel, with Margaret Atwood serving as consulting producer.

Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules.

About Bill’s Book Café

Bill’s Book Café brings book discussion to a new level. At each edition of the series, CEO Bill Ptacek teams up with a local luminary to delve deep into a good book. This edition of Bill’s Book Café is held in Wordfest @ Memorial Park Library’s beautiful, new programming space on the 2nd floor and marks the first of many upcoming collaborations between the Library and Wordfest.