Download or read book Unless written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Swann written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-01-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Larry s Party written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a literary career already ablaze with achievement. As well as the many international awards it received, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award, the book also met with universal critical acclaim and topped bestseller lists around the world. "Carol Shields," raved Maclean's, "has crafted a small miracle of a novel." "The Stone Diaries," said the New York Times Book Review, "reminds us again why literature matters." The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries "a universal study of what makes women tick." Now, in Larry's Party, Carol Shields does 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 flash backward and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the new millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose transforms the trivial into the momentous. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, his interactions with parents, friends and a son. And 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.
Download or read book Happenstance written by Carol Shields and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2003 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A week spent apart for a long-time married couple brings new and frightening experiences for each. Bewildered in a new city, Brenda struggles to cope. Meanwhile, at home, Jack's world falls apart; but while dealing with the crises around him, he learns something about himself.
Download or read book The Republic of Love written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Box Garden written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Small Ceremonies written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 1995-08-29 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Startle and Illuminate written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shimmering with her unique style, sense, humour, vision and wit, Startle and Illuminate is a book of advice and reflections on writing by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields that is destined to become as valued and essential as Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. An essential work from one of Canada's finest writers, Startle and Illuminate stands as a reflection of Carol Shields' devotion to the writer's craft. Drawn together by her daughter and grandson from decades of correspondence with other writers, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, Startle and Illuminate helps answer some of the most fundamental questions about the craft: Why do we write at all? Can writing be taught? What keeps a reader turning the pages? How is a writer to know when a work is done? In her own words, Shields reveals her thoughts on why we read, and more importantly, 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.
Download or read book Wombat Walkabout written by Carol Diggory Shields and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhyming text follows six little wombats on walkabout and a hungry dingo following, envisioning them as his lunch until the wombats turn the tables on him.
Download or read book Dropped Threads 2 written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Duet written by Carol Shields and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011-11-24 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orange Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Carol Shields’ tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life.
Download or read book A Memoir of Friendship written by Carol Shields and published by Viking. This book was released on 2007 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields written by Carol Shields and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Jane Austen written by Carol Shields and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Happenstance written by Carol Shields and published by London : Flamingo. This book was released on 1994 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel about a marriage from the viewpoints of both the husband and the wife at a time when they are both undergoing changes.
Download or read book Thirteen Hands written by Carol Shields and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Celibate Season written by Carol Shields and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original collaboration two award-winning authors, Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, have written an immensely enjoyable novel which give us both sides of a story about the breakdown of traditional roles, rules and communication in a marriage.
