Works by
Carol Shields
(Writer)
[June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003]

Anthologies

• Dropped Threads: More of What We Aren't Told (2003), edited with 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.

• Dropped Threads: What We aren't Told (2001), edited with Marjorie Anderson
  The hidden emotional territory of women's lives--from the joys of belly dancing to the agony of caring for a dying child--is revealed in the pages of Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told. Editors Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson bring together 34 eclectic and engaging pieces by renowned authors (e.g. Margaret Atwood and Bonnie Burnard) as well as women whose day jobs include politics, child-raising, and cattle ranching. Marni Jackson's "Tuck Me In" is an entertaining account of conflicts with a teenage son who considers shampoo a culturally imposed artifact. Perhaps the most powerful essay is "Edited Version," in which Isla James describes her dying child's last days at home....

Biography

• Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields (2007) by Eleanor Wachtel
  A great conversation can offer insight into the hearts and minds of its participants. In this intimate, wide-ranging collection of conversations (and some correspondence), writer-broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel and her friend, author Carol Shields, touch on both the personal and the professional. Eleanor Wachtel first met Carol Shields in 1980; her first interview with Carol occurred in 1987, following the publication of Swann: A Mystery. They soon became friends, embarking on a correspnodence and conversations that would last her almost two decades. In this illuminating book, Eleanor Wachtel brings together her rich collection of interviews with Carol from that first occasion to Shields's death in 2003. Disarmingly direct, Carol Shields talks about her writing, language and consciousness, and her interest in "redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women," all the while touching on topics as diverse as feminism, raising children, the metaphorical search for a home, and the joys and griefs of everyday life. Carol Shields is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. She also won the Governor General's Award for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the Orange Prize, and numerous other awards. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Fiction

• Duet (2003)
  The Box Garden and Small Ceremonies

• Unless (2002) -- Winner Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
  Reta Winters, 44-year-old successful author of lightsummertime fiction, has always considered herself happy, even blessed. That is, until her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college to become a panhandler on a Toronto street corner -- silent, with a sign around her neck bearing the word "Goodness".

• Small Ceremonies (1976)
  Wife, mother, and biographer, Judith Gill finds her own life overshadowed by her need to observe and understand, becoming a woman whose world is shaped by the actions of others, until she discovers her own role as a translator and celebrant of life's small ceremonies.

• The Box Garden (1977)
  Charleen, a divorced woman attending her widowed mother's second wedding, makes startling discoveries about other family members attending the reunion and achieves a new understanding of herself and her own life.
  Later published in a joint edition with Small Ceremonies as Duet

• Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition (1980)

• A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982)

• Swann: A Mystery (1987)
  The lives of four amazingly different individuals become intertwined with that of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet of delicate verse whose genuine talent is only discovered after she is brutally murdered.

• A Celibate Season (1991) with Blanche Howard
  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 Republic of Love (1992)
  The acclaimed author of The Orange Fish and Swann writes a delicious, sophisticated novel of modern romance about a folklorist with a penchant for the past who falls in love with a off-beat, spontaneous disc jockey, who's definitely wrapped up in the present. "A touching, elegantly funny, lucious work of fiction."--New York Times Book Review.

• The Stone Diaries (1993) -- Winner Governor General's Award;  National Book Critics Circle Award; Pulitzer Prize)
  One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy’s vividly described inner life—from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

• Larry's Party (1997) -- Winner Orange Prize; the Prix de Livre
  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.

Non-fiction

• Jane Austen: A Life (2001)
  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.

• Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1976)
  Carol Shields' critical examination of the work of Susanna Moodie is divided into three chapters: Mrs. Moodie and the Complex Personality, Mrs. Moodie and Sexual Reversal, Mrs. Moodie and the Social structure, with a bibliography.

Plays

• Departures and Arrivals (1990)

• Thirteen Hands (1993)

• Fashion Power Guilt and the Charity of Families (1995) with Catherine Shields

• Anniversary (1998) with Dave Williamson

Poetry

• Coming to Canada (1992)
  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).

• Intersect (1974)

• Others (1972)

Short Stories

• The Collected Stories of Carol Shields (2005, Import)
  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.

• Collected Stories (2004)
  With the profound maturity and exquisite eye for detail that never failed to capture readers of her prize-winning novels, Carol Shields dazzles with these remarkable stories. Generous, delightful, and acutely observed, this essential collection illuminates the miracles that grace our lives; it will continue to enchant for years to come.

• Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000)
  In Dressing Up for the Carnival, Carol Shields distills her characteristic wisdom, elegance, and insouciant humor in twenty-two luminous stories. A wealth of surprises and contrasts, this collection ranges from the lyricism of "Weather," in which a couple's life is thrown into chaos when the National Association of Meteorologists goes on strike, to the swampy sexuality of "Eros," in which a room in a Parisian hotel on the verge of ruin is the catalyst for passion, to the brave confidence of "A Scarf"-new for this collection-which chronicles the realities of a fledging author's book tour. Playful, graceful, acutely observed, and generous of spirit, these stories will delight her devoted fans and win her new converts as well.

• The Orange Fish (1989)

• Various Miracles (1985)
  The joys and bewilderments of day-to-day living take on special significance in Carol Shields's short stories.

Other

• A Second Skin: Women Write about Clothes (1999) by Carol Shields, Helen Dunmore, Kirsty Dunseath, and Margaret Atwood
  In A Second Skin, top contemporary writers explore the significance of clothes which have marked a particular point in their lives, touching on themes such as identity, memory, family, sexuality, rebellion, and tradition. From Joan Smith's rumination on underwear and sexual politics to Helen Dunmore's sumptuous description of her mother's red velvet dress, this varied and resonant collection examines the place clothes hold in our lives.

See also:

• Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of Carol Shields (2008) by Alex Ramon

• Biography - Carol Shields (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML

• Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary (2007) by Marta Dvorak and Manina Jones

• Carol Shields. Jane Austen: a life . (Young Adult Review) (Book Review, 2005)
  An article from: Kliatt by Anthony Pucci (Digital - HTML)