Collected Stories

Collected Stories\ \ By Carol Shields \ HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.\ Copyright © 2005 Carol Shields\ All right reserved. \ ISBN: 0060762047 \ \ \ Chapter One\ Dressing Up for the Carnival\ All over town people are putting on their costumes.\ Tamara has flung open her closet door; just to see her standing there is to feel a squeeze of the heart. She loves her clothes. She knows her clothes. Her favorite moment of the day is this moment, standing at the closet door, still a little dizzy from her long night of tumbled sleep, biting her lip, thinking hard, moving the busy hangers along the rod, about to make up her mind.\ Yes! The yellow cotton skirt with the big patch pockets and the hand detail around the hem. How fortunate to own such a skirt. And the white blouse. What a blouse! Those sleeves, that neckline with its buttoned flap, the fullness in the yoke that reminds her of the morris dancers she and her boyfriend Bruce saw at the Exhibition last year.\ Next she adds her new straw belt; perfect. A string of yellow beads. Earrings of course. Her bone sandals. And bare legs, why not?\ She never checks the weather before she dresses; her clothes areweather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light pouring into the narrow street by the bus stop, warming the combed crown of her hair and fueling her with imagination. She taps a sandaled foot lightly on the pavement waiting for the number 4 bus, no longer just Tamara, clerk-receptionist for the Youth Employment Bureau, but a woman in a yellow skirt. A passionate woman dressed in yellow. A Passionate, Vibrant Woman About To Begin I Her Day. Her Life.\ Roger, aged thirty, employed by the Gas Board, is coming out of a corner grocer's carrying a mango in his left hand. He went in to buy an apple and came out with this. At the cash register he refused a bag, preferring to carry this thing, this object, in his bare hand. The price was $1.29. He's a little surprised at how heavy it is, a tight seamless leather skin enclosing soft pulp, or so he imagines. He has never bought a mango before, never eaten one, doesn't know what a mango tastes like or how it's prepared. Cooked like a squash? Sliced and sugared like a peach? He has no Intention of eating it, not now anyway, maybe never. Its weight reminds him of a first-class league ball, but larger, longer, smooth skinned, and ripely green. Mango, mango. An elliptical purse, juice-filled, curved for the palm of the human hand, his hand.\ He is a man of medium height, burly, divorced, wearing an open-necked shirt, hurrying back to work alter his coffee break. But at this moment he freezes and sees himself freshly: a man carrying a mango in his left hand. Already he's accustomed to it; in fact, it's starting to feel lighter and drier, like a set of castanets ...\ \ Continues...\ \ \ \ Excerpted from Collected Stories by Carol Shields Copyright © 2005 by Carol Shields. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

Segue1Various miracles23Mrs. Turner cutting the grass29Accidents40Sailors lost at sea49Purple blooms63Flitting behavior68Pardon82Words87Poaching94Scenes100Fragility112The metaphor is dead - pass it on125A wood (with Anne Giardini)128Love so fleeting, love so fine141Dolls, dolls, dolls, dolls148Invitations165Taking the train171Home178The journal187Salt192Others198The orange fish219Chemistry228Hazel248Today is the day271Hinterland277Block out297Collision314Good manners333Times of sickness and health340Family secrets355Fuel for the fire368Milk bread beer ice382Dressing up for the carnival397A scarf404Weather419Flatties : their various forms and uses427Dying for love431Ilk440Stop!447Mirrors450The harp461Our men and women465Keys473Absence482Windows486Reportage496Edith-Esther502New music514Soup du Jour524Invention532Death of an artist541The next best kiss547Eros565Dressing down579

\ Cleveland Plain Dealer"A revelation and a delight."\ \ \ \ \ O magazine“Marvelous…This big, beautiful collection should win Shields the devoted readership she deserves.”\ \ \ Rocky Mountain News"Surprising, daring, and varied...Shields’ Collected Stories makes you feel more keenly the premature loss of her tremendous talent.\ \ \ \ \ Boston Globe"A joyride…One delightful turn after another."\ \ \ \ \ Seattle Times"Full of wonder and serendipity…the stories are truly remarkable, combining great good humor with poignant observation."\ \ \ \ \ Providence Journal"A master storyteller of complex and surprisingly nuanced life stories."\ \ \ \ \ New York Sun"Transcendent…Shields’s stories are made of the fresh air and sunshine of comfortable daily life."\ \ \ \ \ Washington Post Book World"A magisterial compilation... Shields has left us with an intricate literary map of human relationships."\ \ \ \ \ Charlotte Observer"Genius…[Shields] is one of our strongest voices in literature."\ \ \ \ \ Denver Post"Shields writes about whimsy, happenstance and serendipity, tragedies that really aren’t, and clean, cutting prose about things that really hurt…Amazing."\ \ \ \ \ Miami Herald"Sublime...Original…Superb…These surprising, effervescent stories can only help to ensure the power of [Shields’] legacy."\ \ \ \ \ O Magazine"Marvelous…This big, beautiful collection should win Shields the devoted readership she deserves."\ \ \ \ \ Ann HulbertTaken together, Shields's stories risk seeming like curiously weightless exercises -- lightly parodic postmodern turns. Yet this eclectic bundle of fragments also serves to highlight her novelistic gift and heft. When Shields stitches together such vivid patchworks of lives in her longer fiction, she manages to convey the inadequacy, and also the urgent necessity, of words to give us a grip on our discontinuous selves -- and a glimpse into the ultimately unknowable worlds of others. Shields's novels do tend to end happily. But they are also haunting because she has made us aware that ''the arabesque of the unfolded self'' (a very Shieldsian phrase from ''Absence'') is always a dance over an abyss.\ — The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyShields, who died in 2003, was best known for her novels (The Stone Diaries; Unless), though she published three collections of stories over as many decades, here elegantly gathered and introduced by fellow Canadian and friend Margaret Atwood. Appearing first is her last unpublished tale, "Segue," about an aging couple in failing health-he a famous novelist, she a writer of sonnets-who grow apart as they take "responsibility for [their] own dying bodies." The story serves as a poignant tribute. Overall, Shields's touch is gorgeously light, her tales capturing brief, evanescent moments in the busy lives of couples, mothers and lonely wives. If a few entries seem too brief or lack development, "Hazel" (from The Orange Fish) demonstrates all the elements of Shields's mastery: an ordinary widow, perhaps too polite for her own good, finds a satisfying job as an itinerant kitchen demonstrator and discovers that her timidity and self-effacement can actually be turned to her advantage. From the same collection, the story "Collision" draws on Shields's extended travels and is set in a "small ellipsoid state in eastern Europe," where two lonely people of exotically different background and language collide on a rainy night; the story pursues a separate "biography" of each of the lovers with "every narrative scrap... equally honored." In "Edith-Esther," a story from Shields's last collection, the author prophetically portrays the eponymous protagonist, an 80-year-old novelist, as a "rare bird," pestered by her biographer for "some spiritual breeze" he can put into his book about her. She resists, but the biographer reworks her life the way he wants and in the end, to her dismay, refashions her work as uplifting-the last thing she intended it to be. Uplifting or not, this is a volume full of grace and wisdom. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalThis author received wide notice during her lifetime, through both healthy sales and critical recognition, the latter including the Pulitzer Prize (for The Stone Diaries). This posthumous publication of her complete short fiction will be welcomed by her many readers and will provide a good introduction for those not familiar with her work. The collection opens with "Segue," the only story not published previously, in which a thoughtful woman maintains balance in the post-9/11 world by composing a sonnet every two weeks, one line per day. Writing's solaces and frustrations appear often: in the amusing "Absence," a sticky keyboard forces a writer to produce a complete piece without the letter i; in "A Scarf," a successful author learns an ironic lesson about being true to one's inner self. Many stories examine the quirks of everyday life, where mystery may lie just behind the ordinary ("Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass," "Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls"). Others explore the seemingly minor domestic crises that can discombobulate relationships ("Accident," "Dressing Down," "Hinterland"). All depict distinctive moments in a variety of settings, with moods ranging from nostalgic to farcical. A moving introduction by Margaret Atwood honors Shields's life and writing. Recommended for most collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/04.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThe collected contents of the late (1935-2003) Canadian author's three published story volumes. Various Miracles (1985) showcases Shields's affectionate scrutiny of marital and familial experience, in deft portrayals of a woman's life understood by assembling random "Scenes," a violinist who escapes through music her family's claustrophobic embrace ("A Wood"), a lengthy friendship traced through exchanged Christmas card messages ("Others") and a house-hunting couple's willed flight from the memory of a child's death ("Fragility"). The Orange Fish (1989) focuses mostly on women's imaginative responses to quotidian dilemmas, notably in the tale of a middle-aged couple's Parisian second honeymoon ("Hinterland"), which brings them separate visions of their individual and shared vulnerability and mortality. Shields's fondness for fabulism ("The Harp") and explorations of writers' lives dominates Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000), distinguished chiefly by revelations of how significant meanings inhere in mundane things (the title piece, "Soup du Jour"), and by the comic tale of a resolute nudist ("Dressing Down"): a rich story displaying the rangy inventiveness more prominent in her popular novels (the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning Stone Diaries, etc.). Shields the storyteller is a somewhat lesser writer, but she's always worth reading.\ \