Books by Carol Shields

Did you know that one of the world's best-loved novelists is also an acclaimed playwright? Carol Shields has been delighting audiences for years with her plays, among them, Departures & Arrivals, Thirteen Hands, and Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (all available from Blizzard). In her plays, Carol's familiar readers will discover a whole new facet to this award-winning author of eight novels, including The Stone Diaries, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. In writing for the stage, Carol Shields combines the unparalleled elegance of her prose with an uncanny sense of the ironic, and a devilish penchant for comedy. Her plays push the conventional boundaries of social protocol, upsetting the usual aesthetic of introspection.

Charleen is a divorcee in her mid-thirties, eking out a living as a poet and part-time assistant for an obscure scientific journal. Although she is quick to count her blessings - a son whom she loves, a blossoming relationship with a man, and friends who care about her - Charleen wonders how her life turned out the way it did. Is she a failure? Or is she still struggling to escape the limited world of her childhood? Her search for answers is as exasperating as the meager paycheck she takes to the bank every week. But when she returns home to attend her mother's wedding, Charleen is caught up in a series of unexpected - and terrifying - events. And in coping with these big and small emergencies, she is forced to come to terms with the life she has led and the decisions she has made.

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.

A collection of short works by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer features definitive pieces written throughout the course of her career, including the previously unpublished, "Segue," a portrayal of a sonnet writer who faces an unknown darkness. By the author of The Stone Diaries. Reprint.

The theme of identity and guises run through this collection of twenty-two short stories by the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries and Larry's Party.Reprint.

“There are exciting and truly intimate entries in this book…these women take ideas even secret ones, and infuse them with poetry, scoured and buffed sentences and …stopwatch comic timing…The true depth of the collection is found in these women’s clear memories and their willingness to share.” -- Quill & Quire

“It’s a collection of revealing essays and short stories by 35 Canadian women at mid-life and beyond, reflecting on the life events that caught them off guard and, somehow, haven’t been talked about…As it turns out, there are many dropped threads in our lives. Weave them together and you’ve got a tapestry.” -- Bonnie Schiedel, Chatelaine, April 2001

“Dropped Threads … is a collection of 34 pieces by Canadian women in which they describe…everything they never said or were not able to say before, but which had tremendous power in their lives…[Senator Sharon Carstairs’s] essay about women in politics [is] clear-eyed and devastating …Miriam Toews examines her father’s lifelong battle with depression, which culminated in his suicide … with gentleness and insight … These are all the conversations we would wish to have with friends and these essays stimulate the sense of exuberance and relief that one always feels after a long, self-revelatory talk.” -- Virginia Beaton, Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 25 Feb 2001

“Dropped Threads is a much-awaited anthology of essays and stories by Canadian women, including celebrated writers as well as women who are neither writers nor famous … The angst of the women in Dropped Threads covers a wide spectrum.” -- Paul Gessell, Ottawa Citizen, 20 Jan 2001

“if the value of books were measured by the insights stored within their pages, Dropped Threads would be priceless…[This] is a wonderfully well-written and excellently edited book that offers such intimate insights that it sometimes seems like a stream of consciousness. The compositions frequently make the reader feel like an eavesdropper -- and an extremely entertained one at that…The stories in Dropped Threads cathartically tie up loose ends for their writers, while providing readers with an exquisitely crafted patchwork quilt of life experiences.” -- Winnipeg Free Press

On Lily Redmond’s Mrs. Jones, writing about abortion:
“One of the most powerful essays... . So many of us can talk with ease about the theory – our unwavering support for a woman's right to choose – but no woman ever wants to make that tragic choice or even admit to having once made it.” -- Pamela Wallin,@globebooks.com

On Joan Barfoot’s Starch, Salt, Wine, Chocolate:
“Barfoot is always interesting and her take on female friendship is clever and well observed. Loyalty, Barfoot feels, is the most important gift of friendship, although spinoffs abound.” -- Nancy Schiefer, The London Free Press

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. In a review of the first collection in the Globe and Mail, Zsuzsi Gartner wrote that the story "Edited Version" had "the transformative power of art–you emerge from it knowing that a small but significant part of your human journey has been altered." Readers will find the same kind of treasure in Dropped Threads 2.

"Poignant and comic insights". -- The Globe and Mail Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright Carol Shields collaborates with her daughter, Catherine Shields to explore the social and private worlds of the modern family in this funny, poignant and gently challenging play.

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels have delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb novelist from her early family life in Steventon 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 accomplished author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Carol Shields' magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

Carol Shields's biography of Jane Austen emphasizes what is known about the private woman as well as the great novelist.

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.

Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike.

In her Introduction, Carol Shields writes, [Mansfield Park's] overriding theme is difficult to isolate, since the novel is about everything it touches upon: nurturing, steadfastness, belonging and not belonging, about fine gradations of moral persuasion, about human noise and silence, and about action and stillness.

Who is Midlifeman? Any man in his forties of fifties. Not yet over the hill, he's still agile enough to be a son, a father, a husband, a lover, a friend--frequently all at the same time. He is more self aware than he's ever been before and just as preoccupied with sex and love and work and cars and sports (not necessarily in that order), but he's also just met his mortality, and it's jolted him. If he's going to achieve something with his life, he's got to do it now. Larry Krotz knows this. A Midlifeman himself, he has a keen eye for both the trivial and the tough issues that men of the boomer generation are now facing. Wry, observant, reflective, MIDLIFEMAN is the companion men need as they enter their middle years.

Twelve short stories by Pulitzer Prizewinner Carol Shields.

Gathered from 100 different workshops, these remarkably diverse stories possess the quality of works by more established authors, while offering the pleasure of discovering the unpredictable and irresistible voices of an up-and-coming generation.

Judith Gill is a biographer who spends her days trying to understand other people's lives instead of her own. Her children confuse her, she feels alienated from her husband. She is an observer--but eventually what she observes is the importance of the small ceremonies of life.

From her birth in rural Manitoba, to her journey with her father to southern Indiana, to her years as a wife, mother, and widow, to her old age, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to find a place for herself in her own life.

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.

Reta Winters is a successful novelist, Tom is a doctor, and they've been living together for over 20 years. Life has been good until Reta's daughter Norah leaves home and becomes a street person in Toronto. Carol Shields's novel--which she claims will be her last (she was suffering from terminal cancer when she wrote it)--is about not only family and its complexities, but the literary life and its intersection with what is real. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

The joys and bewilderments of day-to-day living take on special significance in Carol Shields's short stories.