Carol Shields

The Stone diaries

Reta Winters, aged 44, has started a new sort of life. She has discoverd the meaning of loss for the first time.

For all of her days, Reta has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime'. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws fromt the world, abandoning university, family and loving boyfriend to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign around her neck bearing one word, 'GOODNESS', the anguish of her loss leads Reta into a desperate search for the possible causes of her daughter's retreat. Casting her net ever wider, her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny meditation on our society and where we find meaning and hope.

Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Shields's remarkably supple prose. At once the discomforting, ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and a searing portrait of life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Unless is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called 'ordinary' lives.

--front flap

Unless

Jane Austen (Penguin Lives)

Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Carol Shields gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose makes the trivial into the momentous. 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 of self. Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy and faultless wisdom.

Larry's Party

Judith Gill, a biographer, finds herself analyzing her childrens' developing lives and trying to understand her distant husband, instead of living her own life

Small Ceremonies

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 Republic of Love

What We Aren't Told

Dropped Threads

“Nothing short of astonishing.” — New Yorker “A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” — Los Angeles Times For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope. The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.

A Novel

Swann tells the story of 4 individuals whose lives become etwined in the life of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet whose authentic and unique voice is discovered only hours before her violent death.

Swann

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.

Dressing Up for the Carnival

Marjorie May Anderson

1. Which stories stood out for you and why? 2. Which stories were most disturbing or most surprising and why? 3. Considering that the first volume of this book was on the best seller list of the Globe and Mail for 85 weeks, what do you think accounts for the interest from readers? What do books of this nature offer women? 4. Choose your favourite piece in Dropped Threads and prepare a one-minute testimonial to share with your book club on why this piece touched you.

"Her style is often ironic, affectionately mocking... with a delicacy and subtlety of language". -- Books in Canada With flexible casting and flexible production requirements, this play is ideally suited for the classroom. In 22 vignettes set in an airport departure and arrival lounge, Departures and Arrivals captures a spectrum of travellers awakening to contemporary limbo. Shields' dialogue uncovers the hidden opportunities, missed and taken, which shape peoples' lives.

Departures & Arrivals

A husband and wife exchange vows of celibacy when she has to move to the other side of the country for a job. Over a period of a year they exchange letters, telling each other how they are doing. The setting is Canada.

A celibate season

Portrays the changes in a marriage, involving new evaluations of friends, family, career associates, and particularly the partners themselves, when the loving wife goes away for a short time and the happily married husband has a mid-life crisis

Happenstance

Marjorie Anderson

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.

More of What We Aren't Told

Dropped Threads 2

Stone Diaries

إلا إذا

Larrys Party

Aylin Yengin

İyilik

In the course of her extraordinary career, which included the novels The Stone Diaries, Larry's Party, The Republic of Love and Unless, as well as poetry, short stories, biography and plays, Carol Shields was unfailingly encouraging of other writers. She read and commented on her friends' manuscripts. She taught writing classes and she spoke and wrote on the craft of writing. Her own discipline rarely faltered. Her daily practice was to write a new page, then edit the page written the day before, then repeat, until, after a year or so, her book was finished. Now in her own words, as clear and straightforward as a glass of water, comes Startle and Illuminate, the best possible guide to the writing process, from conception to publication. This essential work, drawn by her daughter and grandson from her voluminous correspondence with other writers, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, is a last gift from one of our finest novelists meant for both aspiring and established writers. It helps answer some of the most fundamental questions about writing: such as, why we write at all, whether writing can be taught, what keeps a reader turning the pages, and how a writer knows when a work is done. For Shields's devoted readers, Startle and Illuminate reveals her own thoughts on why we read--to be the other, to touch and taste the experience of the other; and why we write--for the joy of the making, to reimagine our world, to discover patterns and uncover forms that echo our realities as well as interrogate them, to imagine alternate worlds. It is a beautiful legacy.

Carol Shields

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