Carol Shields And The Extra Ordinary

Claiming the "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary" as critical categories, contributors to this volume explore the philosophical and literary import of Carol Shields's writing, its complex play with genre and narrative technique, its re-valuing of domesticity and gendered perspective, and the social critique implicit in its gentle satirical impulses.

In the course of her extraordinary career, which included the novels The Stone Diaries, Larry's Party, The Republic of Love and Unless, as well as poetry, short stories, biography and plays, Carol Shields was unfailingly encouraging of other writers. She read and commented on her friends' manuscripts. She taught writing classes and she spoke and wrote on the craft of writing. Her own discipline rarely faltered. Her daily practice was to write a new page, then edit the page written the day before, then repeat, until, after a year or so, her book was finished. Now in her own words, as clear and straightforward as a glass of water, comes Startle and Illuminate, the best possible guide to the writing process, from conception to publication. This essential work, drawn by her daughter and grandson from her voluminous correspondence with other writers, essays, notes, comments, criticism and lectures, is a last gift from one of our finest novelists meant for both aspiring and established writers. It helps answer some of the most fundamental questions about writing: such as, why we write at all, whether writing can be taught, what keeps a reader turning the pages, and how a writer knows when a work is done. For Shields's devoted readers, Startle and Illuminate reveals her own thoughts on why we read--to be the other, to touch and taste the experience of the other; and 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, to imagine alternate worlds. It is a beautiful legacy.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The stories collected here offer an entrancing look at some of the various miracles of everyday life, the quirks of chance and coincidence, life's setbacks and improvisations. Carol Shields deftly draws us into the lives of a broad range of sharply observed characters, from the brilliant young violinist smothered by an overprotective family, to the elderly widow mowing her lawn while a long, passionate life buzzes around in her memory. Blending wit and compassion, Shields illuminates moments when ordinary people face extraordinary circumstances, declarations of love and revelations that transform their lives. Sharp, skeptical and sympathetic, this collection presents Shields at her inimitable best in twenty-one miracles of the storyteller's art.