Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935, Carol Shields studied at Hanover College, the University of Exeter in England and received an MA from the University of Ottawa. She has been a Professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia, and has taught at the University of Manitoba for the past fifteen years. In 1996, she became the Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. |
Unless: A Novel
by Carol Shields.
If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone's amazement, a fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,' or so it was described in Publishers Weekly. That cheeky self-description sums up the protagonist of Shields's latest, the precocious, compassionate and feisty Reta Winters, an accomplished author who suddenly finds her literary success meaningless when the oldest of her three daughters, Norah, drops out of college to live on the streets of Toronto with a placard labeled Goodness hung around her neck.
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The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields.
This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs.
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Larry's Party
by Carol Shields.
Carol Shields's novel raises such questions on the limited choices that result from unexamined lives. Shields's provocative hero offers her readers an excellent conversation piece for dinner parties. Larry's Party is a curiously unsettling comedy of our time.
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