A collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood. Of the twelve, I have listed the ones I found exceptional below. There were a couple of mediocre ones (or perhaps just ones I didn't relate to as well). But, as I usually find with Atwood, the writing was universally superb.

Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother
A woman’s memories of her mother, which struck me as both poignant and true.

“I used to think that my mother, in her earlier days, led a life of sustained hilarity and hair-raising adventure. (That was before I realized that she never put in the long stretches of uneventful time that must have made up much of her life: the stories were just punctuation.)”

Betty
Told from an adolescent point of view, this is the story of Betty and Fred, the couple who live in the cottage next door during a beach summer. Betty is sweet, he is charming, and the young girls are crazy for him. What the girl, looking back, reflects on is how Betty was the nice one, but Fred was preferred. She comes to realize that Fred was just like a million others, while Betty was unique.

Bluebeard’s Egg
This becomes a bit of a retelling of a fairytale. The fairytale is one in which Bluebeard’s wives break their promise not to enter a forbidden room and pay by being butchered by him. He is then deceived into believing his final wife is honest and true, when in fact she is only clever. The parallel is the story of Ed and Sally. Ed is also not true or honest, only clever, but the fairytale is reversed, Sally is the victim not the Bluebeard.

The Sin Eater
This is the story of our narrator and her psychiatrist, Joseph. They talk about sin eaters before his death and she dreams of being asked to eat his sins after he unexpectedly dies in an accident that might be a suicide.

“This world is all we have, says Joseph. It’s all you have to work with. It’s not too much for you. You will not be rescued.”

The stories are full of beautiful prose and imagery and Atwood’s moments of proverbial wisdom.

“One of my sons has just reached the shower-and-shave phase, the other one hasn’t, but both of them leave a deposit every time they pass through a room. A sort of bathtub ring of objects–socks, paperback books left face-down and open in the middle, sandwiches with bites taken out of them, and, lately, cigarette butts.”

“The sunrise is not a thing, but only an effect of the light caused by the positions of two astronomical bodies in relation to each other. The sun does not really rise at all, it is the earth that turns. The sunrise is a fraud.”

( )

A collection of stories about the lives of women -- even the one or two that are from a male POV are really more about women -- and about relationships between men and women or between children and parents. They're mostly the kind of literary stories in which not much actually happens and in which there doesn't even necessarily seem to be a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. The one exception, perhaps, is "Uglypuss," about a woman's attempt to get at a cheating man by way of his cat. As a cat lover, I found that one highly disturbing, and part of me wishes one fewer thing had happened in it, honestly. It's definitely an effective story, though. And, like all of them, it's well written. Atwood's prose isn't showy, but it's smooth and beautiful, and full of subtlety. ( )

"The life she's led up to now seems to her entirely crazed. How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other ..." Quite a few stories of this collection present women stranded in their middle age, trying to understand what happened. These are the best of the collection, full of unforgettable lines and observations and presented with a type of humour all of the author's own: "Her only discoverable ambition as a child was to be able to fly, and much of her later life has been spent in various attempts to take off."
( )

A collection of short stories/writings... they tend to involve emotionally fraught , unresolved issues. Not always an easy read (emotionally), but a worthwhile one. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. ( )

I read the Handmaid's tale years ago and found it astounding. So I was disappointed with these dull slice-of-life short stories, full of sad characters. Just finished it, and most of the tales are forgotten already.
I presume Atwood's huge reputation wasn't based on these. ( )