Carol Shields: 20 books

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,...

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...

What are those life experiences that catch us by surprise, that haven't ever been part of our discussions or readings because they lie beyond the limit of words or the courage and will to articulate? When Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson began asking other women - friends, colleagues, family members...

The small miracles of our day-to-day lives are on captivating display in this unforgettable collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields Various Miracles brings together twenty-one short stories, modern parables that illuminate the mysteries of everyday existence. In the title story,...

“Shields writes with an almost painfully attuned ear for the nuances of language and the way they attach to feelings and probe the most delicate layers of human consciousness. . . . She reminds us again why literature matters.” — New York Times Book Review With an Introduction by Margaret...

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...

In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is...

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...

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...

Forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, writer, and translator, is living a happy life until one of her three daughters drops out of university to sit on a downtown street corner silent and cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap and a placard round her neck that says "Goodness." The...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Stone Diaries gives us a love story for the ages: the tale of two polar opposites on a rocky road to romance He’s a thrice-divorced late-night talk-show host. She’s an unmarried folklorist obsessed with mermaids. He lives for the present. She lives...

An accomplished biographer wants to create a compelling life story of her own in a novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Stone Diaries. What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches? Judith Gill lives with her husband, son, and daughter in...

The story of a woman dancing on the edge of a difficult life Ever since her husband left her—seemingly vanishing into thin air—Charleen Forrest has supported herself and her fifteen-year-old son on what she earns as an obscure poet and part-time gofer for an even more obscure scientific...

Arthur Ellis Best Crime Novel Award Winner: A “funny, poignant, surprising” (Margaret Atwood) literary detective story centering around a murdered poet.   Who is Mary Swann? In this novel of a writer’s revenge, an uneducated farmer’s wife delivers a paper bag filled with scraps...