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Short Stories
In Collected Stories of Carol Shields
(2004), readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields' short
story collections - Various Miracles (1985), The
Orange Fish (1989) and Dressing Up for the Carnival
(2000) - in one volume, along with the previously unpublished
story, "Segue," her last.
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Carol Shields's short stories have
given me happiness, not just pleasure. They're prismatic;
they delight at first by the clear and simple elegance
with which they are made, then there is something so
bountiful and surprising, like beautiful broken lights."
- Alice Munro
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 Read
an Excerpt
Click here
to read the short story "Dressing Up for the
Carnival" (from the book Dressing Up for the Carnival,
included in Collected Stories.)
Buy
the book
Click here
to buy Various Miracles, The Orange Fish
or Dressing Up for the Carnival individually.
Awards
 Winner
Marian Engel Award 1990 (The Orange Fish)
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Segue is, as one would expect,
a masterful and engaging piece of writing, and happily
it works almost as well as a short story as it would
have had circumstances permitted it to be the beginning
of a longer, finished project…. With the arrival on
the shelves of this handsomely designed and important
collection, we her readers can experience once again
the privilege of stepping into Carol Shields's brilliantly
rendered, many-faceted world with all its dramatic contrasts
of private light and darkness."
- The Globe
and Mail
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Playful, charming, acutely observed
and generous of spirit, this collection of stories will
delight and enchant Carol Shields fans everywhere."
- randomhouse.ca
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Reviews
Collected Stories of Carol
Shields reviewed by Clara Thomas
Books in Canada
Carol Shields's Collected Stories
was published, with the cooperation of her family, one
year after her death. "Segue", a chapter from the novel
she was working on when she died, is included along with
the complete collections, Various Miracles, The
Orange Fish and Dressing up for the Carnival.
Her daughters Anne and Sara were actively engaged in the
book's preparation and made themselves available for interviews.
The finished work is a handsome collection, her family's
memorial to the writer whose remarkably diverse talents
leave us a shining legacy. New readers as well as long-devoted
readers will be captivated by its largesse: we expect
from Shields a large generosity, a questing intelligence,
an acute wit, an eye for the deceptively ordinary and
above all a constant word-enchantment; in these pages
we will not be disappointed. ...
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A radiant gift, a brilliant archive."
-Winnipeg
Free Press
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Every story in this collection is
a small, glittering masterpiece."
- National
Post
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Home Truths
Collected Stories of Carol
Shields
reviewed by Laura Ciolkowski
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 6, 2005; Page BW07
Virginia Woolf knew how things would
be for a writer like the late Carol Shields, a housewife
and mother of five who published her first novel in 1976
at the age of 40, and performed the miraculous magic trick
of writing fiction from within the elusive open spaces
of her harried and overflowing domestic world. In a literary
climate in which the minutiae of daily life are too frequently
seen as a distraction rather than as the raw material
for fiction, a so-called miniaturist like Shields, Woolf
understood, would be written off as a lightweight, mired
in the trivialities that great writers ostensibly must
overcome. Woolf mocked the high-Victorian arbiters of
taste and the stuffy, patriarchal style-makers of her
time: "This is an important book, the critic assumes,
because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book
because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene
in a shop -- everywhere and much more subtly the difference
of value persists."
Like Jane Austen, a master chronicler
of the depth and psychological weightiness of the apparently
ordinary world of women (and the subject of Shields's
prizewinning 2001 biography in the Penguin Lives series),
Shields was not able to dodge charges of a lack of literary
seriousness in her work, in spite of her impressive collection
of honors and prizes, including a Pulitzer, a National
Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize for fiction.
The critics "said that I wrote 'women's books,' 'domestic
novels,' as if that were a lesser thing," she confessed
in an interview conducted just three years before her
death from cancer in July 2003. "But I knew then as I
know now that the lives of women are serious and interesting."
...
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No writer in the English-speaking
world has written more eloquent, witty and graceful
sentences than Carol Shields…. If the purpose of fiction
is to break up the frozen seas within us, as Kafka once
said, spending a few days in the company of Shields'
stories allowed me to re-experience the poignancy of
human life and, at the same time, its undeniable comedy,
its sensuality and beauty."
- Susan
Swan in National Post
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A grand gift for a true Shields
fan."
- Toronto
Star
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Intelligent, provocative and entertaining."
- The New
York Review of Books
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'Collected Stories' : Woman
on the Edge
Collected Stories of Carol
Shields reviewed
by Ann Hulbert
New York Times
February 6, 2005
"Canadian women are on the
edge of the edge -- this has to give edge to voices.''
In the spring of 2002, a year before she died of breast
cancer, that was how Carol Shields celebrated the bracing
literary company she kept in her adopted country. For
male writers up north, she observed, there was no ''haunting
of the big cats: Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway''
(whose birthplace was her own hometown, Oak Park, Ill.).
For Shields, surprised by the Pulitzer Prize for ''The
Stone Diaries,'' there was an invigorating sisterhood.
In Alice Munro, whose praise adorns the back cover of
this fat volume, and Margaret Atwood, who contributed
the introduction, she found birds of a feather. All born
in the 1930's, they took flight at their own pace, which
for Shields meant taking her time.
She was 40 in 1976 when her first
novel appeared, a housewife with five children and an
engineer husband whom she had married right out of college.
Over the next 16 years, she produced six novels and two
of the three collections of stories -- ''Various Miracles''
and ''Orange Fish'' -- in this omnibus edition; the third,
''Dressing Up for the Carnival,'' appeared in 2000. Her
trademark characters, kindly but confused souls making
their way in a land of ''people sugaring off and drinking
tea and casting for trout and nodding amicably,'' won
Shields a largely Canadian following. She also earned
a kindly reputation herself as a warm-hearted writer from
Winnipeg with a fondness for happy endings. ...
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A radiant gift, a brilliant archive,
a book of common prayer for those who appreciate the
transcendence of all that is prosaic...this latest
clutch of stories is rich with a poetic intensity
seldom present in contemporary fiction today. Dressing
Up for the Carnival is a book to be savoured, the
kind of book a dedicated reader will place gently
on the bedside table, doling out one story each night
to make the book last longer."
- Winnipeg
Free Press
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Infused with a sly humour, these
poignant stories revel in the ordinary, with a few
side trips to the sublime… both moving and wry."
- Washington
Post
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Reading beyond the fridge
magnets:
Carol Shields short stories
show depths some critics overlooked, says Hermione Lee
Collected
Stories of Carol Shields
reviewed by Hermione Lee
The Guardian
July 3, 2004
In the last years of her life, Carol Shields
went on working. She published a remarkable novel, Unless,
a volume of stories, and a short, sympathetic life of
Jane Austen. The biography dealt feelingly with the frustrations,
deprivations and solitude of a great woman writer with
no literary confidantes and a restrictive family life.
The novel gave the story of a woman writer of light novels,
whose daughter had run away from home to adopt an extremist
life of "goodness" - either of madness or sainthood. The
novelist, Reta Winters, was writing angry, unsent letters
about the exclusion and powerlessness of women. Reta had
already made an appearance in one of the late stories,
"A Scarf", in which she says, of herself and other women
writers, "Not one of us was going to get what we wanted."
The same phrase recurs in Unless.
These late themes forcibly suggested
that the tendency to celebrate Shields as a benign, tender,
mild observer of ordinary, minor lives has not made for
a perfect fit. There is a good deal of fury and resentment
in her work, and she can be sharp and bitter. ("In his
late forties he fell in love with another woman. Was she
younger than his wife? Yes, of course she was younger.")
She was a late-20th-century feminist who saw that women
(including women writers) are still being patronised and
minoritised all over the place. The very everydayness
and ordinariness she was so praised for attending to was
also what allowed her to be somewhat condescended to,
in spite of the prizes and the good reviews. ...
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Shields is a sympathetic storyteller
who brings her quirky, touching characters to exuberant
life."
- New
York Newsday
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Interview
Peter Gzowski talks with Carol
Shields on CBC Radio about The Orange Fish
| PG |
The characters
in The Orange Fish, a new collection of short fiction
by the Winnipeg author Carol Shields are a disparate
group but they share a certain trait. They tend to
be ordinary people, powerless, maybe a little afraid.
One woman hopes to reduce life's complexities by posting
on her fridge an encouraging slogan. Another woman,
a mother, would rather not know about her son's amputated
leg. They're survivors whose survival tactics are
very much at the heart of Carol Shields' fiction and
I'm happy to welcome Carol Shields now. Good morning. |
| CS: |
Good morning.
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| PG: |
Was that
a fair summary of what you're getting at in this book? |
| CS: |
Yes. I am
very happy with your summary I have to say. |
| PG: |
I didn't
do it all myself so I'm even happier with it. |
| CS: |
Yes, survival.
Yes. |
| PG: |
Can we
talk about Orange for a moment and then we'll talk
about survival? |
| CS: |
Yes. |
| PG: |
I didn't
start counting - I had to read this in page strips
which is a nuisance when you want to read in bed so
I didn't do as good a job as I may have. But there
are so many orange references in every story I wondered
is there an orange in every story? |
| CS: |
I have no
idea. You mean you find this right through the whole
book? |
| PG: |
Well
there's an orange fish, an orange sun, an orange plastic
bag, an orange subway pass, orange hair, orange…. |
| CS: |
Good Lord.
Good Lord. This is operating unconsciously and I didn't
even know it. I have an orange fixation. The title
story is of course The Orange Fish certainly is deliberate
but I must have these colours floating through my
brain. No, no. The Orange Fish came about because
I actually own - I have to confess - I own a picture
called The Orange Fish which I've had for years and
I love it. |
More
Reviews
Dressing Up for the Carnival
reviewed by Bob Brandeis, amazon.com
In her third collection of short
fiction, Dressing Up for the Carnival, Carol Shields
employs two tales about clothing as structural bookends.
The title story, which functions as her opening salvo,
begins with a highly suggestive sentence: "All over town
people are putting on their costumes." In some cases,
of course, this is a literal description. Tamara, for
example, dons a yellow cotton skirt without checking the
weather, for "her clothes are the weather, as powerful
in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning
light." But clearly Shields is also making a statement
about identity--about the mix-and-match process of deciding
who we are. Thus we get the more discreet high jinks of
X, an anonymous middle-aged citizen who, sometimes, in
the privacy of his own bedroom, in the embrace of happiness,
waltzes about in his wife's lace-trimmed nightgown....
He lifts the blind an inch and sees the sun setting boldly
behind his pear tree, its mingled coarseness and refinement
giving an air of confusion.
The final story, "Dressing Down,"
details the friction between a hardcore nudist and his
reluctant wife, and suggests very nearly the opposite
moral: we are defined by the garments we remove. Elsewhere,
Shields explores the questions of identity and intimacy
with less of a sartorial accent. "Invention" features
another fractured marriage, this one done in by the wife's
invention of a steering-wheel muff ("Money began to trickle
in, then became rivers of money, especially when she introduced
her famous faux-leopard muff, which became the signature
for all that was chic, young, adventurous, and daring").
In "Eros," surely among the most elegant stories in this
elegant collection, sex is both transcendent and suffocating,
an entrance into the self and every human being's cross
to bear. Dressing Up for the Carnival is a witty
performance in which Shields occasionally thumbs her nose
at the very notion of the traditional short story (much
as she tinkered with novelistic protocol in The Stone
Diaries). But make no mistake: she's a serious artist,
with her eye fixed firmly on the naked (or at least half-undressed)
truth.
- Bob Brandeis, amazon.com
Itemize This
In Carol Shields' stories,
things are not what they seem
Dressing Up for the Carnival
reviewed by David Willis McCullough
Nearly three-quarters of the way
through this collection of 22 short stories by the author
who won just about every prize in sight for her 1994 novel,
''The Stone Diaries,'' there is a sentence that calls
out to be quoted, since it seems to be the perfect description
of the book as a whole. But by that time, Carol Shields
has revealed herself to be such a witty, mercurial, playful
writer, such a devious literary chameleon, that the reader
may suspect a trap. Could it be that this all-too-perfect
line is dangling there, just ripe for plucking, to see
who will tumble and quote it? Might it even be a parody
of something someone has already observed about Shields's
work? It says a lot about the sheer, sometimes perverse
fun in this book that such questions come to mind. (The
word ''carnival,'' after all, does not appear in the title
by chance.) But for whatever reason, the sentence is there:
''The ordinary has become extraordinary.'' ...
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A wise, expansive voice… the author
turns normal everyday memories and events into poetic
prophecy."
- Newsday
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