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Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061828165
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
“[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women’s lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel.” —Chicago Tribune The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family’s anguish and healing, proving Shields’s mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life. For all of her life, forty-four-year-old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light “summertime” fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out of college to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads “GOODNESS.” Reta’s search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope. “Nothing short of astonishing.” —The New Yorker “A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” —Los Angeles Times “Like The Stone Diaries, which won Shields a Pulitzer Prize, and her tour de force follow-up novel, Larry’s Party, Unless presents itself, almost instantly, as a story about ordinary lives. But then, through her sensitive observations and exacting prose, the author proceeds to flip them over and show us their uncommon depths . . . a fine novel.” —The Washington Post Book World
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061828165
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Get Book Here
Book Description
“[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women’s lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel.” —Chicago Tribune The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family’s anguish and healing, proving Shields’s mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life. For all of her life, forty-four-year-old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light “summertime” fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out of college to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads “GOODNESS.” Reta’s search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope. “Nothing short of astonishing.” —The New Yorker “A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” —Los Angeles Times “Like The Stone Diaries, which won Shields a Pulitzer Prize, and her tour de force follow-up novel, Larry’s Party, Unless presents itself, almost instantly, as a story about ordinary lives. But then, through her sensitive observations and exacting prose, the author proceeds to flip them over and show us their uncommon depths . . . a fine novel.” —The Washington Post Book World
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 030736724X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307364119
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 1039004202
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 1841154687
Category : Married people
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0394224841
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307364127
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0345815955
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Diggory Shields
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525478655
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Shields
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0679312064
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
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.
