New Releases by Carol Shields

Newly discovered work by one of Canada’s favourite writers The Canadian Shields brings together fifty short writings by Carol Shields (1935–2003), including more than two dozen previously unpublished short stories and essays and two dozen essays previously published but never before collected. Invaluable to scholars and admirers of Shields’s work, the writings discovered in the National Library Archives by Nora Foster Stovel and presented to the public here for the first time reflect Shields’s interest in the relationships between reality and fiction, mothers and daughters, and gender and genre. They also reveal her love of Canada, especially Winnipeg, her home for twenty years. Originally written for women’s magazines, travel journals, convocation addresses, and even graduate school term papers, Shields’s imaginative essays explore ideas about home, Canadian literature, contemporary women’s writing, and the future of fiction. Whether autobiographical, cultural, or feminist in focus, these works vividly illuminate the multiple chapters of Shields’s writing life. Margaret Atwood and Lorna Crozier frame Shields’s texts with tributes to her work and impact. An introduction by Stovel situates Shields as a Canadian author and subversive feminist writer, demonstrating how American-born-and-raised Carol Anne Warner became “the Canadian Shields”—a quintessential and beloved Canadian writer and the only author to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Fiction.

With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the hands of a blackjack dealer, Carol Shields introduces us to two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There''s Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man. And right across the street there''s Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who has focused a little too intently, having married and divorced three times. Can Fay believe in lasting love with such a man? Will romantic love conquer all rational expectations? Only Carol Shields could describe so adroitly this couple who fall in love as thoroughly and satisfyingly as any Victorian couple and the modern complications that beset them in this touching and ironic book.

The superb first novel from the author of The Stone Diaries, winner of the Governor General''s Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Judith Gill is a well-respected biographer who desperately wants to write fiction. When she joins her academic husband on sabbatical in Birmingham, she finds on the shelves of their rented flat the notes of a failed novelist. With considerable guilt, Judith decides to plagiarize one of the ideas and brings it home to Canada to work on. Frustrated by the creative process but determined to be more imaginative, Judith attends writing classes and later discovers that her tutor, suffering from writer''s block, has ripped off ''her'' idea. Once again, Shields focuses her sharp gaze on the small ceremonies of life in this novel of rare intelligence and wit.

A superb collection of short stories from the author of The Stone Diaries, winner of the Governor General''s Award. Emerging from these twelve beautifully articulated stories are portraits of men and women whose affairs and recoveries in life take us into worlds that are both new and yet unnervingly familiar. A smile of recognition and a shock of surprise await readers of these finely crafted stories. From the magical orange fish itself--enigmatic and without age--to holiday reunions; from the passions and pains of lovers and friends to the moving uncertainty of a Parisian vacation, this exquisite collection is bound to delight and enchant Carol Shields''s fans everywhere.

Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields’s life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields’s novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields’s fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields’s career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter’s angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries. The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel’s detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.

Einfühlsam und elegant erzählt Pulitzer-Preisträgerin Carol Shields die Geschichte einer Mutter, die gezwungen wird, alles Selbstverständliche hinter sich zu lassen und neue Wege einzuschlagen. Ihr Leben scheint perfekt und sie selbst unverwundbar. Reta Winters ist eine verwöhnte Frau, die alles hat: gute Freunde, eine liebevolle Familie und beruflichen Erfolg. Als ihre Tochter Norah eines Tages ihre vielversprechende Universitätslaufbahn abbricht, um an einer Straßenecke zu sitzen, das Wort »Güte« auf einem Schild um den Hals, bricht für Reta eine Welt zusammen. Warum tut Norah so etwas? Was hatte sie, Reta, falsch gemacht? Zum ersten Mal empfindet sie das Gefühl von Verlust und beginnt unbeirrt nach dem wahren Grund für Norahs Entscheidung zu suchen. »Die Geschichte der Reta Winters« erzählt von Menschlichkeit, Mut und Liebe und von der Kostbarkeit des Lebens.

Un sourire de reconnaissance attendrie apparaîtra sur les lèvres du lecteur. Pourtant, la surprise l’attend au détour. Entre le poisson rouge magique – énigmatique et sans âge – aux réunions de famille, la passion et la souffrance d’amants et d’amis, et l’incertitude de vacances à Paris, cet exquis recueil de nouvelles plaira et enchantera à coup sûr. Ce recueil avait reçu le prix Marian Engel (1990). Publié en français.

Madelief Goedewil komt in 1905 op wonderlijke wijze ter wereld in Manitoba, midden op de Canadese prairies. In een tiental episodes beschrijft De stenen dagboeken haar leven tot haar dood in de jaren negentig. De lezer maakt kennis met Madelief via haar eigen bewustzijn, maar ook vanuit het perspectief van haar echtgenoten, haar vriendinnen, haar kinderen en kleinkinderen. Madeliefs leven, dat bijna de hele twintigste eeuw omvat, is op een aantal opmerkelijke gebeurtenissen na betrekkelijk gewoon. Door de bijzondere manier waarop Carol Shields haar roman heeft opgebouwd en door haar subtiele verteltrant wordt duidelijk dat juist dat ‘alledaagse’ vol fascinatie en mysterie is.

Denne fiktive biografi handler om Daisy Goodwill, som er født i 1905. forfatteren prøver gennem kapitlerne fortæller om hendes barndom, ægteskab, enkestand, nyt ægteskab, moderskab og alderdom.

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. In The Stone Diaries, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, Carol Shields weaves the strands of Daisy’s life together in a rich, sensuous, and poignant work that delivers lasting insights into the nature of life—and fiction.

Until events run wildly out of hand, Charleen Forrest manages to cope with the uncertainties of a failed marriage, trying to live her own life and raise a son on her frugal income. She is not unaware of the hazards: "family, banktellers, ex-husband, landladies, bus drivers... men on the make who want her to lie back and accept (this is what you need, baby), friends who feel sorry for her." Her resourcefulness is a delight; her uncanny observations and surprising irony reveal a witty, wry edge that is apt to make you laugh out loud.

Carol Shields''s award-winning and critically acclaimed "literary mystery," first published in 1987. Swann is the story of four individuals who become entwined in the life of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet whose authentic and unique voice is discovered only hours before her husband hacks her to pieces.Who is Mary Swann? And how could she have produced these works of genius in almost complete isolation? Mysteriously, all traces of Swann''s existence — her notebook, the first draft of her work, even her photograph — gradually vanish as the characters in this engrossing novel become caught up in their own concepts of who Mary Swann was.

“Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.” Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction.

Carol Shields, the Pulitzer Prize-winner author of the novels Unless, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party was also a renowned short story writer. Now readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields’s short story collections – Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival – in one volume, along with the previously unpublished story, “Segue,” her last. With an eye for the smallest of telling details – a woman applying her lipstick so “the shape of pale raspberry fits perfectly the face she knows by heart” – and a willingness to explore the most fundamental relationships and the wildest of coincidences, Shields illuminates the absurdities and miracles that grace all our lives. From a couple who experiences a world without weather, to the gentle humor of an elderly widow mowing her lawn while looking back on a life of passion, to a young woman abandoned by love and clinging to a “slender handrail of hope,” Shields’s enormous sympathy for her characters permeates her fiction. Playful, charming, acutely observed and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will delight and enchant Carol Shields fans everywhere. Excerpt from The Collected Stories of Carol Shields Let me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer — just look into the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”

The idea for Dropped Threads: What We Aren''t Told came up between Carol Shields and longtime friend Marjorie Anderson over lunch. It appeared that after decades of feminism, the “women''s network” still wasn''t able to prevent women being caught off-guard by life. There remained subjects women just didn''t talk about, or felt they couldn''t talk about. Holes existed in the fabric of women''s discourse, and they needed examining. They asked thirty-four women to write about moments in life that had taken them by surprise or experiences that received too little discussion, and then they compiled these pieces into a book. It became an instant number one bestseller, a book clubs'' favourite and a runaway success. Dropped Threads, says Anderson, "tapped into a powerful need to share personal stories about life''s defining moments of surprise and silence." Readers recognized themselves in these honest and intimate stories; there was something universal in these deeply personal accounts. Other stories and suggestions poured in. Dropped Threads would clearly be an ongoing project. Like the first volume, Dropped Threads 2 features stories by well-known novelists and journalists such as Jane Urquhart, Susan Swan and Shelagh Rogers, but also many excellent new writers including teachers, mothers, a civil servant, a therapist. This triumphant follow-up received a starred first review in Quill and Quire magazine, which called it “compassionate and unflinching.” The book deals with such difficult topics as loss, depression, disease, widowhood, violence, and coming to terms with death. Several stories address some of the darker sides of motherhood: - A mother describes how, while sleep-deprived and in a miserable marriage, she is shocked to find infanticide crossing her mind. - Another woman recounts a memory of her alcoholic mother demanding the children prove their loyalty in a terrifying way. - A woman desperate for children refers to the bleak truth as: "Another Christmas of feeling barren." Narrating the fertility treatment she undergoes, the hopes dashed, she is amusing in retrospect and yet brutally honest. While they deal with loss and trauma, the pieces show the path to some kind of acceptance, showing the authors’ determination to learn from pain and pass on the wisdom gained. The volume also covers the rewards of learning to be a parent, choosing to remain single, or fitting in as a lesbian parent. It explores how women feel when something is missing in a friendship, how they experience discrimination, relationship challenges, and other emotions less easily defined but just as close to the bone: - Alison Wearing in “My Life as a Shadow” subtly describes allowing her personality to be subsumed by her boyfriend''s. - Pamela Mala Sinha tells how, after suffering a brutal attack, she felt self-hatred and a longing for retribution. - Dana McNairn talks of her uncomfortable marriage to a man from a different social background: "I wanted to fit in with this strange, wondrous family who never raised their voices, never swore and never threw things at one another." Humour, a confiding tone, and beautiful writing elevate and enliven even the darkest stories. Details bring scenes vividly to life, so we feel we are in the room with Barbara Defago when the doctor tells her she has breast cancer, coolly dividing her life into a ''before and after.'' Lucid, reflective and poignant, Dropped Threads 2 is for anyone interested in women''s true stories.

A Memoir of Friendship is a rich collection of the letters Shields and Howard exchanged from 1975 to 2003. Carol Shields took her place on the world literary stage when she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries. Blanche Howard, 22 years older than Carol and herself a published, award-winning author, became Shields''s mentor and confidante.Written with humour and insight, this window into their daily lives explores their friendship, their disappointment and joys, their ambitions, and their thoughts on other writers and the craft of writing.

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award–winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

Un roman en deux parties, présentées tête-bêche, qui raconte l''histoire d''un mariage du point de vue de chacun des protagonistes. Créatrice de courtepointes, elle quitte la maison pour la première fois afin d''assister à un congrès d''artisans et se sent grisée par un sentiment de liberté. Historien, il s''occupe des deux adolescents restés à la maison tout en se laissant rattraper par la nostalgie du passé. Un roman doux-amer, très prenant, sur les innombrables liens qui se tissent à l''ntérieur d''un couple. [SDM].

A punto de cumplir cuarenta y cuatro anos, el universo de Reta Winters, versada novelista y traductora, felizmente unida (pero no casada) a Tom, padre de sus tres hijas, se derrumba el dia en que descubre que su hija mayor, Norah, lo deja todo b"hogar, universidad y noviob" para sentarse en la esquina de una calle con un letrero alrededor del cuello que dice: bondad, y una escudilla para mendigar. La angustia por esa perdida hace que Reta se embarque en una busqueda desesperada para averiguar los motivos del abandono de su hija. Ninguna de las razones obvias parece encajar. A medida que Reta avanza terreno, sus pesquisas se convertiran en una imperterrita, a menudo tronchante, explicacion de nuestra sociedad y de las razones por las que una joven puede llegar a concluir que no hay ningun sitio para ella. Dejarlo todo es una brillante y atrevida novela que posee la indiscutible maestria de las extraordinarias obras sobre la llamada B+gente corrienteB; .

A quarante-quatre ans, Reta Winkers est une femme heureuse. Romancière, traductrice, mère de trois enfants, elle voit sa tranquille existence bouleversée le jour où Norah, sa fille aînée, disparaît. On la retrouve assise au coin d''une rue de Toronto, plongée dans un mutisme total. Autour de son cou, un écriteau où l''on peut lire le mot "bonté". Ce drame conduit chaque membre de la famille à se remettre en question. La vie intérieure de Reta et son écriture s''en trouvent radicalement transformées. D''incessantes questions se bousculent dans sa tête : pourquoi n''a-t-elle pu empêcher la fuite de sa fille ? S''agit-il d''un acte de révolte ou d''un simple appel au secours ? Que faire pour ramener Norah à la "vie" ? À travers le récit de cette introspection, Carol Shields nous livre par petites touches, d''une plume grave mais souvent teintée d''humour et d''ironie, les clés d''une réflexion brillante sur la société actuelle et sur la place que celle-ci accorde aux femmes.

Jocelyne et Charles entament une séparation forcée et réalisent qu''ils se sentent solidaires moralement de leur entourage quotidien. Un roman sur les difficultés que rencontrent les couples à assumer la durée et le bouleversement des rôles traditionnels.

A bestselling collection of short stories from the author of The Stone Diaries (winner of the Pulitzer prize) and Larry’s Party (winner of the Orange prize) All over town people are putting on their costumes; X slips into his wife’s lace-trimmed night gown and waltzes around his bedroom; Tamara is no longer the dull clerk receptionist when she wears that yellow skirt, she evolves into a stunning creature exuding passion and vitality. In ‘Weather’ a couple’s life is thrown into utter chaos when The National Association of Metereorologists go on strike – what will they wear? What will they eat? In ‘Soup du Jour’ a young boy contemplates life, the cracks in the pavement and his mother’s soup-making. Each story encapsulates the human spirit, its diversities, complexities and absurdities. Shields observes with compassion the carnival that goes on in each of our lives and the realities that we create for ourselves. Carol Shields’ second collection of short stories celebrates the extraordinary details that are found in ordinary, everyday lives.

Lauréate du prix Pulitzer pour La Mémoire des pierres, la romancière canadienne Carol Shields entreprend ici le portrait d''un homme ordinaire : Larry Weller, né à Winnipeg en 1950. Paysagiste, deux fois divorcé, père d''un petit garçon, Larry, la quarantaine passée, cherche encore son destin. Un destin que semble symboliser ou résumer sa passion pour les labyrinthes de jardin, dédales trompeurs qui ressemblent à sa vie, et qui sont aussi son refuge. S''adaptant aux circonstances pour répondre à ce que la société et les autres attendent de lui, Larry a traversé la spontanéité des années 70, l''enchantement trompeur des années 80, les difficiles années 90. Une odyssée qui reflète, avec un humour jubilatoire et une lucidité impitoyable, la condition masculine à la fin du XXe siècle.

Faced with a job-related ten-month separation, Jocelyn and Charles choose to maintain contact through letters--an economic decision that paves the way for two very entertaining sides of the same story.