Download or read book Fashion Power Guilt and the Charity of Families written by Carol Shields and published by Blizzard Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Thirteen Hands And Other Plays written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-04 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a Foreword by the Author “Before becoming a playwright I was a novelist, and one who was often impatient with the requisite description of weather or scenery or even with the business of moving people from room to room. I was more interested in the sound of people talking to each other, reacting to each other, or leaving silences for others to fall into.” -- Carol Shields From one of Canada’s most beloved authors comes a collection of four works written for the stage, including her most popular and highly acclaimed play Thirteen Hands. The theatrical form allows Carol Shields’ strength as a master of dialogue to shine at its brightest, as she returns to themes she explores in her prose: love, family, friendship, and the hidden meanings and larger truths found beneath the surface of the minutiae of daily life. Thirteen Hands and Other Plays is an exhilarating introduction to Shields’ considerable achievements as a playwright. Departures and Arrivals (1990) dramatizes how lives are heightened and enlarged when taken within the frame of public spaces -- airports, train stations, public streets -- so that we all become, in a sense, actors. Thirteen Hands (1993), a musical, valorizes a consistently overlooked group in our society, “the blue-rinse set” -- also known as “the white glove brigade” or “the bridge club biddies” -- and has had the strongest professional run of all Shields’ plays. Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (1995), written with her daughter, Catherine Shields, interrogates the ambivalence felt towards families, the drive we all share to find or create some kind of family, and the equally strong desire to escape the family’s fury. Anniversary (1998), written with Dave Williamson, is a domestic drama of discontented, middle class suburbanites. One couple in the play are married and pretending to be close to separation. Another couple, who are separated, are pretending to be married. The additional irony is that the separated couple are still emotionally together, while the married couple have already emotionally separated.
Download or read book Carol Shields Narrative Hunger and the Possibilities of Fiction written by Ted Farrell and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers. Inspired by the quality and scope of Shields's work, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction addresses her creative exploration of postmodernism. As the first thorough examination of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this collection of essays establishes the groundwork for future studies of her oeuvre. The collection begins with a significant new essay from Shields herself, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,' perhaps her most substantial commentary upon her own aims as a writer. In addition, scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and Australia explore the complexity of Shields's work and her contributions to the genre of the novel. These lively essays reflect Shields's verve and her playful approach to today's sophisticated critical thinking. Among the topics are Shields's use of biography and autobiography, metafiction, popular romance, and symbolism. While the essays foreground the unreliability of language, and hence our inability to know one another or even ourselves, the contributors argue that Shields has taken a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology. Containing several essays on Swann and The Stone Diaries, Shields's most popular works, and the most extensive annotated bibliography available of works by and about Shields, this collection will appeal widely to scholars, students, and readers of Carol Shields and Canadian fiction.
Download or read book Carol Shields written by Aritha Van Herk and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2009 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beloved of readers and writers alike, Carol Shields was a formidable creative force. The author of dozens of books, she won a Pulitzer Prize and an Orange Prize, a Governor General's award, and many other honours and recognitions. And this extraordinary writer's work continues to inspire lovers of language from around the world. Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo gathers together a bouquet of literary responses. Critics, friends, and fellow writers from North America and Europe here respond to the writing of Carol Shields. Their observations, augmentations, and creative interventions make for a collection that pays homage to Shields, but nonetheless possesses its own distinctive flavour. Her magnificent words continue to reverberate, evoking laughter and memory, and echoing her perceptive eloquence.
Download or read book The Collected Stories of Carol Shields written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Excerpt from The Collected Stories of Carol Shields Let me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer — just look into the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”
Download or read book West words written by Moira Jean Day and published by University of Regina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West-words gives the reader a bird's-eye view of the contemporary theatre scene across the prairies.
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 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 The Stone Diaries written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. In The Stone Diaries, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, Carol Shields weaves the strands of Daisy’s life together in a rich, sensuous, and poignant work that delivers lasting insights into the nature of life—and fiction.
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 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 Happenstance written by Carol Shields and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two unique novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare weekend apart in their many years of marriage. Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents, while immobilized by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. Brenda, travelling alone for the first time, is in a strange city grappling with an array of emotions and toying with the idea of an affair. Intimate and insightful yet never sentimental, Happenstance is a profound portrait of a marriage and the differences between the sexes that bring life — and a sense of isolation — into even the most loving of relationships.
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 The Canadian Short Story written by John Metcalf and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be far less without his efforts. Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, Metcalf’s magisterial The Canadian Short Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List, Metcalf’s critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its author’s most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us all.
Download or read book Relating Carol Shields s Essays and Fiction written by Nora Foster Stovel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields’s experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields’s essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields’s writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction. These essays read Shields’s fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction.
Download or read book The Worlds of Carol Shields written by David Staines and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Worlds of Carol Shields is the first book to examine Shields’ extraordinary career and life through the lens both of close friends and of literary critics.
Download or read book Liminal Spaces written by Alex Ramon and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of the work of Carol Shields. Arguing against enduring conceptions of Shields’s fiction as celebratory domestic miniaturism, the study presents her work as more expansive and equivocal than has sometimes been recognised, reading her texts as “liminal spaces” situated on a series of formal and thematic borders. Close attention is paid to Shields’s stylistic experimentation, to her subversions of auto/biography and historiography, and to the significance of her critical writing, while works which have previously received very little analysis, such as her early poetry collections, are also examined. Intertextual links between Shields’s work and that of a range of other writers including Phillip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are identified and explored, and the study also draws extensively on manuscript materials which give an insight into Shields’s working methods and extend debate about her experiments with narrative perspective and genre-mixing.
