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Summary: A Graduate-level Course in 220 pages
Review: I just finished reading this book--twice!--and may just read it again. An intelligent, provocative, and very funny discussion of life lived in the writing realm. Each of Atwood's chapters could support a book-length volume of its own. Her ability to cross the boundaries of time, genres, genders, the human and the divine is astonishing. She is genius. The back matter--notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index--are invaluable, and if you'd like you could launch a lifetime of study just using her references as the guidepost. This book has gotten me excited again about literature--a dive deep into the profound waters, far from the frothy, frivolous "acclaimed" writing that has increasingly made me feel so discouraged and alienated. No, this is not a how-to. This is a wondering-how-and-why.
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Summary: Just finished and need to read it again
Review: I love the new perspectives I gained from Atwood. She provides her view of the relationship between the text and the reader, the author and the text, and the reader and the author. She delves into literary theory in way I find approachable. I gained much insight from her literary references (allusions, if you will) and find the endnotes and bibliography to be a treasure trove. At times, I felt a bit disconnected to the text, but after reading a library copy, I need to get my own, so I can write in it.
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Summary: Another purchase i did not research well enough.
Review: I purchased this book, looking for insight, wisdom, and a bit of advice from someone who has been around the writing block a little while. Though, it seems, I purchased the wrong book. I am a 21 year old american male, and i suppose that is why I could not identify with a Canadian born, female author who spends quite a bit of the book relaying how difficult it was for her starting out in the 60's and 70's. Most of the things she discussed are issues long since resolved in the open minded times we now live in. I suppose someone a bit older than myself may have a completely different outlook, based entirly on their own life experiences. But, as it stands, I suffered through this book. Another drawback to it, was her endless references to obscure passages to books long before our time. She quoted many books I have never heard of, therefore I missed the point she was trying to make entirely. So, if you have a few years under your belt, and are very well versed in 19ths century literature, have a crack at it, but as for me, im glad i can move on to something new to read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Waste of time and money
Review: I was so disappointed in this book - it's very egotistical in assuming we really care about the author's memories of her bell-bottom hippy days - very little about actual writing and just a total waste. Too bad.
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Summary: Banal and tedious
Review: What a disappointment. Instead of the insightful observations Atwood is capable of -- and I have heard her speak -- this book is a mishmash of cutesy comments and esoteric references.
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Summary: Gobbledegook!
Review: When I first picked up Negotiating with the Dead, I was excited about the insights one of the masters of the writing craft might be willing to share. I envisioned the intimacy of a kitchen-table talk, with Atwood revealing her deepest writing secrets while lamenting about the difficulty of the craft. But as I settled into my chair, it soon became apparent it was more like I was seated in a lecture hall (the book was born out of a series of lectures Atwood gave at Cambridge) and the lector intended to drone on and on about nothing of particular importance with only tenuous ties to the art of writing. A reluctant host, she says herself in the book's introduction, "Writing itself is always bad enough, but writing about writing is surely worse, in the futility department." Her disclaimer, in part, reads, "I'm not a scholar or a literary theoretician," and I'm reminded of how someone once said the only thing worse than a bore is an unqualified bore. Atwood draws mostly on the works of other writers, but also on interviews and conversations with writers in an attempt to answer three basic questions: "Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Where does it come from?" On the whole, she doesn't even come close to answering these questions, and once the purpose is stated, it's like she thought, 'Well now that's out of the way. I've given the work direction. Now I can do as I please!' To be fair, she does produce a laundry list of reasons why writers write, some of which aren't half bad. ("Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive.") But even this list seems more like the product of a quick brainstorming session than of deep, reflective thought, and she digresses widely from there. For example, we spend almost 30 pages exploring the writer's need to leave one's self for the sake of writing, and the duplicity that results. Among the evidence presented to support this argument is the fact Atwood had a nickname in childhood in addition to her given name. "All writers are double," she continues, relentlessly, "for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between the composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person." Other suppositions along the same lines are equally absurd: "And how many times have you read in some review or other that a writer has finally found his 'voice'? Of course he has done no such thing. Instead, he has found a way of writing words down in a manner that creates the illusion of a voice." One can't help but wonder if Atwood is herself experiencing a little too much duplicity when she asks, "Where does it come from, this notion that the writing self - the self that comes to be thought of as 'the author' - is not the same as the one who does the living?" Uh, you? She veers off briefly into a discussion of twins, but soon returns to her obsession du jour, the "double," for "the double is more than a twin or sibling. He or she is you, a you who shares your most essential features - your appearance, your voice [guess that wasn't an "illusion" after all], even your name - and, in traditional societies, such doubles were usually bad luck." A chapter dedicated to writing for art's sake vs. commercial appeal is equally inane. "...I have no answers," Atwood concludes after a lot of pointless debate; a statement that would seem to sum up the essence of the book. The book's only redeeming quality, as far as providing insight goes, is the little morsels Atwood shares about how she came to be a writer, but even these are few and far between. The book's subtitle should have been: A Writer Rambles on about Writing.
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Summary: beautiful
Review: Writing is a very delicate and complex subject. It would cheapen the craft to present it in the way of many writers on writing; general oppinons on the craft surrounded by tips and words of encoragement. Atwood provides a personal perspective as well as many literary allusions to writing and the struggles and epiphanies writers endure. The book is written with great care and compassion. It is absolutely amazing.
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Summary: Part of a Great Tradition
Review: You have to wonder if most of the previous reviewers of this book have actually read any of Atwood's fiction. If they had, they would have known the kinds of topics that interest her and that she might pursue in lectures about her career as a writer. It's hard to imagine, for example, criticizing Atwood for drawing references from 19th century literature. I see this book as following in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Eudora Welty, by combining stories about the author's life as a woman with her reflections on what it has meant to write fiction of the highest order.
Rating:
Summary: horrible, horrible, horrible
Review: You know those reviewers who wish they could give it zero stars? Yeah, I'm one of those now. I got this book for an Individualized Writing class, and it gives memoirs a bad name. This book isn't about writing. If it's supposed to be a memoir, it has no point. It's one of the very, VERY few books that I didn't even finish.
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