Most Popular Books by Carol Shields

“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.

The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries a "universal study of what makes women tick." With Larry''s Party Carol Shields has done the same for men. Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator''s perception, irony, and tenderness. Larry''s Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997, that seamlessly flash backward and forward. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, and his interactions with his parents, friends, and a son. Throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes--so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties, and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self. Larry''s odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy, and faultless wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The stories collected here offer an entrancing look at some of the various miracles of everyday life, the quirks of chance and coincidence, life''s setbacks and improvisations. Carol Shields deftly draws us into the lives of a broad range of sharply observed characters, from the brilliant young violinist smothered by an overprotective family, to the elderly widow mowing her lawn while a long, passionate life buzzes around in her memory. Blending wit and compassion, Shields illuminates moments when ordinary people face extraordinary circumstances, declarations of love and revelations that transform their lives. Sharp, skeptical and sympathetic, this collection presents Shields at her inimitable best in twenty-one miracles of the storyteller''s art.

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, 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?”

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.

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.

''The beautiful irony of Happenstance is that its novels are both bound together and held apart by the strength of the marriage they describe.'' Rupert Christiansen, Harpers and Queen These companion novels - by turns touching, compassionate and humorous - tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman. In all the years of their marriage they have hardly ever been apart. In THE WIFE''S STORY, Brenda, now forty years old, and who has been surprised to discover a source of creative energy, is about to spend a week away from their home in a Chicago suburb to attend a craft convention in Philadelphia. It is her first trip alone. Removed from her familiar environment, all the gathering emotions that have unsettled her life over the last few years are focussed and bring her to a crisis. Brenda is vulnerable in a strange city. She is also ready to grasp whatever experiences come her way. In THE HUSBAND''S STORY, back in Chicago, Jack faces his own crisis. It is the first time he has been left to cope on his own. He is immobilised by self-doubt, beginning to question his worth and the value of his work as a historian. Suddenly, in that one week, his world falls apart. He has to deal with an attempted suicide, a marital breakdown and, not least, their two difficult children. In the process, he manages to work out his feelings and to learn something about himself.

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.

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.

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.

In a record breaking "hat trick," Carol Shields was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Stone Diaries, the Canadian Governor General''s Literary Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Britain''s prestigious Booker Prize. Carleton University Press is pleased to release a newly designed edition of her poetry book, Coming to Canada, first published by CUP in 1992. This collection of nearly 60 poems includes the key "Coming to Canada" sequence, and is supplemented with selections from two previous volumes, Others (1972) and Intersect (1974). Among the finest writers in the world, Carol Shields has won a large and loyal audience as a witty, compassionate and insightful novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. She is the author of 15 books. Arriving in Canada from the United States in 1957, Shields is a long-time resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she is Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg.

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.

An critical examination of the work of the Canadian writer Susanna Moodie including analysis of Life in the Clearings, Roughing It in the Bush, Waiting for Dead Men''s Shoes, and Matrimonial Speculations.

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; .

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.