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– Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival – in one volume, along with the previously unpublished story, “Segue,” her last.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?”

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“Segue is, as one would expect, a masterful and engaging piece of writing, and happily it works almost as well as a short story as it would have had circumstances permitted it to be the beginning of a longer, finished project…. With the arrival on the shelves of this handsomely designed and important collection, we her readers can experience once again the privilege of stepping into Carol Shields’s brilliantly rendered, many-faceted world with all its dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness.”
—The Globe and Mail

“A grand gift for a true Shields fan.”
—Toronto Star

“No writer in the English-speaking world has written more eloquent, witty and graceful sentences than Carol Shields…. If the purpose of fiction is to break up the frozen seas within us, as Kafka once said, spending a few days in the company of Shields’ stories allowed me to re-experience the poignancy of human life and, at the same time, its undeniable comedy, its sensuality and beauty.”
—Susan Swan in The National Post

Praise for Carol Shields's short stories:
"Carol Shields's short stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure. They're prismatic; they delight at first by the clear and simple elegance with which they are made, then there is something so bountiful and surprising, like beautiful broken lights."
—Alice Munro

"Every story in this collection is a small, glittering masterpiece."
—National Post

"A radiant gift, a brilliant archive."
—Winnipeg Free Press

"Wry, witty, wise and fiercely intelligent."
—Janette Turner Hospital

"These poignant stories revel in the ordinary, with a few side-trips to the sublime."
—Washington Post

"Intelligent, provocative and entertaining."
—The New York Review of Books

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Segue

-- Various Miracles--
Various Miracles
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass
Accidents
Sailors Lost at Sea
Purple Blooms
Flitting Behavior
Pardon
Words
Poaching
Scenes
Fragility
The Metaphor Is Dead – Pass It On
A Wood (with Anne Giardini)
Love so Fleeting, Love so Fine
Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls
Invitations
Taking the Train
Home
The Journal
Salt
Others

-- The Orange Fish --
The Orange Fish
Chemistry
Hazel
Today Is the Day
Hinterland
Block Out
Collision
Good Manners
Times of Sickness and Health
Family Secrets
Fuel for the Fire
Milk Bread Beer Ice

-- Dressing Up for the Carnival --
Dressing Up for the Carnival
A Scarf
Weather
Flatties: Their Various Forms and Uses
Dying for Love
Ilk
Stop!
Mirrors
The Harp
Our Men and Women
Keys
Absence
Windows
Reportage
Edith-Esther
New Music
Soup du Jour
Invention
Death of an Artist
The Next Best Kiss
Eros
Dressing Down


From the Hardcover edition.

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Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, Carol Shields moved to Canada at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of Exeter in England, and then obtained her M.A. at the University of Ottawa. She started publishing poetry in her thirties, and wrote her first novel, Small Ceremonies, in 1976. Over the next three decades, Shields would become the author of over twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, a book of criticism on Susanna Moodie and a biography of Jane Austen. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages.

In addition to her writing, Carol Shields worked as an academic, teaching at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba. In 1996, she became chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She lived for fifteen years in Winnipeg and often used it as a backdrop to her fiction, perhaps most notably in Republic of Love. Shields also raised five children — a son and four daughters — with her husband Don, and often spoke of juggling early motherhood with her nascent writing career. When asked in one interview whether being a mother changed her as a writer, she replied, “Oh, completely. I couldn’t have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. And my children give me this other window on the world.”

The Stone Diaries, her fictional biography of Daisy Goodwill, a woman who drifts through her life as child, wife, mother and widow, bewildered by her inability to understand any of these roles, received excellent reviews. The book won a Governor General’s Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bringing Shields an international following. Her novel Swann was made into a film (1996), as was The Republic of Love (2003; directed by Deepa Mehta). Larry’s Party, published in several countries and adapted into a musical stage play, won England’s Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. And Shields’s final novel, Unless, was shortlisted for the Booker, Orange and Giller prizes and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and won the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction.

Shields’s novels are shrewdly observed portrayals of everyday life. Reviewers praised her for exploring such universal themes as loneliness and lost opportunities, though she also celebrated the beauty and small rewards that are so often central to our happiness yet missing from our fiction. In an eloquent afterword to Dropped Threads, Shields says her own experience taught her that life is not a mountain to be climbed, but more like a novel with a series of chapters.

Carol Shields was always passionate about biography, both in her writing and her reading, and in 2001 she published a biography of Jane Austen. For Shields, Austen was among the greatest of novelists and served as a model: “Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain.” In 2002, Jane Austen won the coveted Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. A similar biographical impulse lay behind the two Dropped Threads anthologies Carol Shields edited with Marjorie Anderson; their contributors were encouraged to write about those experiences that women are normally not able to talk about. “Our feeling was that women are so busy protecting themselves and other people that they still feel they have to keep quiet about some subjects,” Shields explained in an interview.

Shields spoke often of redeeming the lives of people by recording them in her own works, “especially that group of women who came between the two great women's movements…. I think those women’s lives were often thought of as worthless because they only kept house and played bridge. But I think they had value.”

In 1998, Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. Speaking on her illness, Shields once said, “It’s made me value time in a way that I suppose I hadn’t before. I’m spending my time listening, listening to what's going around, what's happening around me instead of trying to get it all down.” In 2000, Shields and her husband Don moved from Winnipeg to Victoria, where they lived until her passing on July 16, 2003, from complications of breast cancer, at age 68.

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