Carol Shields - Böcker

Dazzling novel from Carol Shields, author of ‘The Stone Diaries’, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and ‘Larry’s Party’, winner of the Orange Prize.‘Breathtaking…a masterpiece.’ Geoffrey Wansell, Daily MailReta Winters has a loving family, good friends, and growing success as a writer of light fiction. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university to sit on a street corner, wearing a sign that reads only ‘Goodness’. As Reta seeks the causes of her daughter’s retreat, her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny meditation on society and where we find meaning and hope. ‘Unless’ is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called ‘ordinary’ lives.

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.Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: her eccentric husband, her secretive children and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet. While Judith analyses the minutiae of lives past and present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. As their mother’s wedding approaches, both sisters must come to terms with the paths they have chosen.Originally published as two companion novels: Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden.

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of her career.The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death in 2003.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.

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.

From Simon & Schuster, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998 showcases the most exciting and innovative invoice in North American fiction from 1998.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 .

Fall head over heels with this collection of unconventionaland heartfelt romances that will leave you longing for more. From icons offeminist literature to forgotten Chinese modernists, these women writers chartevolutions of love across lifetimes, from the first flush of youth to growingold together. This new anthology gathers the talents of Margaret Atwood,Virginia Woolf, Amy Bloom, E. M. Delafield, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Taylor,Mary Lavin, Ling Shuhua, Jessamyn West and Carol Shields.This anthology brings together forgotten and celebratedfemale masters of the short story format. In the spirit of the Women Writersseries, these stories first appeared in books and periodicals published in thetwentieth century. The result is a carefully curated collection of stories thatsketch evolving understandings of love and female agency, as their heroinesnavigate romance and commitment, idealism and realism, innocence andexperience.

Bestselling, award-winning novelist writing about one of the most popular and enduring English novelists - recently voted best author of all time.'Splendid ... a gem' LITERARY REVIEW'An excellent biography' MAIL ON SUNDAY'Shields on Austen offers up a delicious prospect. And we are not disappointed' SCOTSMANJane Austen was one of the world's most remarkable writers, whose characters are as alive today as they were two hundred years ago. Despite being one of the most perceptive writers about people and relationships, she never married and always lived with her parents and sister Cassandra.Perhaps unusual for women at that time, Jane Austen was acutely aware of the larger political and social world around her, but chose to focus her novels on the family as a microcosm through which to explore human nature.The prizewinning novelist Carol Shields gives us a beautifully written, perceptive look at the life of one of the finest and most popular English novelists of all time.

A bestselling collection of short stories from the author of The Stone Diaries (winner of the Pulitzer prize) and Larry’s Party (winner of the Orange prize).All over town people are putting on their costumes; X slips into his wife’s lace-trimmed night gown and waltzes around his bedroom; Tamara is no longer the dull clerk receptionist when she wears that yellow skirt, she evolves into a stunning creature exuding passion and vitality. In ‘Weather’ a couple’s life is thrown into utter chaos when The National Association of Metereorologists go on strike – what will they wear? What will they eat? In ‘Soup du Jour’ a young boy contemplates life, the cracks in the pavement and his mother’s soup-making.Each story encapsulates the human spirit, its diversities, complexities and absurdities. Shields observes with compassion the carnival that goes on in each of our lives and the realities that we create for ourselves. Carol Shields’ second collection of short stories celebrates the extraordinary details that are found in ordinary, everyday lives.

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.A CELIBATE SEASON is the story of a married couple, Jocelyn and Charles, (Jock and Chas) and their self-imposed separation of ten months when Jock accepts a job in a city more than three thousand miles away from her family. As "breadwinner" and suddenly "single" again Jock is confronted with local politics, loneliness and advances from the opposite sex. Meanwhile back at home, Chas, an unemployed architect, is now a "single parent" who has to reacquaint himself with his teenage children, Mia and Greg, learn to run a household and shift his career priorities. Throw in an attractive young housekeeper, a mother-in-law who enjoys her wine, a touch of teenage angst, some unexpected home renovations and a disastrous Christmas dinner and you have modern family life.

Widely regarded as a modern classic, The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; that of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman born in Canada in 1905. Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, it follows Daisy's life through marriage, widowhood, motherhood, and old age, as she charts her own path alongside that of an unsettled century. A subtle but affective portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life, this multi-award-winning story deals with everyday issues of existence with an extraordinary vibrancy and irresistible flair.

A celebration of love in its many guises, The Republic of Love recounts the heartfelt tale of two of life's unlucky lovers: Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man; and, right across the street, Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who s been through three marriages and divorces in his search for true happiness.

These two companion novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare time apart in their many years of marriage. In The Husband's Story, Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents while immobilised by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. In The Wife's Story, 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.

Mary 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 brutally murders her. 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 in this engrossing novel exploring the surprising afterlife of a murdered poet.