Living/FYI: Food -- KansasCity.com (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
Grief and guilt rule Dot Weller’s life after she accidentally kills her mother-in-law with home-canned beans. The once-bubbly housewife in Larry’s Party, a novel by Pulitzer winner Carol Shields, suffers a lifetime of depression and agoraphobia — all because she failed to get an airtight seal on a jar.
Bill Peschel (Free subscription) | 06/02/2008
B orn today: Marquis de Sade, novelist, iconoclast, Paris, 1740; Thomas Hardy, novelist, poet, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, 1840; Rudolph Lehmann, poet, editor, translator, Bourne, Buckhamshire, 1907; Barbara Pym, novelist, Oswestry, Shropshire, 1913; Carol Shields, novelist, short-story writer, Oak Park, Ill., 1935. Died: Alfred Austin, poet, Ashford, Kent, 1913; George S. Kaufman, drama critic, playwright,...
Tales from the Reading Room (Free subscription) | 05/11/2008
How do you write about the worst things? Not, maybe the acute disasters, which are all fire and brimstone and crisis talks, but chronic sadness, the infinite pain of not knowing, the intolerable burden of loss? It's been missing children week here, and I’ve read Carol Shields’ novel Unless, and Amanda Eyre Ward's How To [...]
Harold Jarche (Free subscription) | 04/02/2008
The Capitol Theatre will be presenting a bilingual presentation of Carol Shields’ play, Departures & Arrivals this month. Given all of the discussion about the need for bilingualism in the province, let me just note that our son, who is in the early French immersion program, is acting in this production which is showing on 18 [...]
Gilmore Girl Fanatic (Free subscription) | 02/15/2008
I usually am not a fan of books about writers. Especially when the book is about a writer who is writing a book about a writer, who is probably writing a book about a writer. It's just too confusing. The only time this is acceptable is on the Stephen Colbert Show when he stands in [...]
normblog (Free subscription) | 01/31/2008
I'll second that - a strongly positive review at Random Jottings of Margaret Forster's novel Over. It's far superior, in my view, to Unless by Carol Shields, though the two books share a common theme. The difference between them? The...
San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 01/07/2008
Bang Crunch By Neil Smith VINTAGE ORIGINAL; 242 PAGES; $13.95 PAPERBACK Canada has produced a number of the world's best short-story writers over the past couple of decades: Carol Shields, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro foremost among them, as well as Margaret...
The Little Professor (Free subscription) | 12/29/2007
Favorite literary fiction: Briege Duffaud, A Wreath Upon the Dead; Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic; Akira Yoshimura, Shipwrecks; Jim Crace, Being Dead; Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen; Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries. Favorite mysteries: Ian Rankin, Exit...
normblog (Free subscription) | 12/23/2007
BookMooch - 40,000 members and rising; 2,500 titles swapped daily. It's an online book-swapping service. You can read about it here.
Philip Spires commonplace book (Free subscription) | 12/10/2007
Unless by Carol Shields has been my third novel in a row written from the perspective of a self-analytical, self-critical and perhaps self-obsessed female narrator, the other being by Margaret Drabble and Anne Enright. Maybe Carol Shields drew the short straw, because I felt that Reta, the writer-narrator of Unless, internalised everything, so much so, in fact, that the other characters in the book...
Slog (Free subscription) | 11/30/2007
This week in the books section, the mighty Tao Lin categorizes the levels of greatness American fiction writers can achieve. The levels: CENTIPEDE IN THE DARKNESS (Noah Cicero), THREE-FOR-A-DOLLAR FEEDER FISH (Steve Almond), $9.98 PETCO GERBIL (Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley), PONY ON A PONY FARM OF A CHILD OF A BILLIONAIRE (Joy Williams/Mary Robison/Frederick Barthelme/Ann Beattie), USED HONDA...
Bookninja (Free subscription) | 11/30/2007
Jessa points to Tao Lin's Stranger piece riffing on types of American writers, from lowest to highest…. $9.98 PETCO GERBIL: Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley Have won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards but are thought of by most critics, writers, and journalists to be primarily romance authors or perhaps “self-help” authors, partly because all their [...]
AustenBlog . . . she's everywhere (Free subscription) | 09/04/2007
We are delighted to report that AustenBlog reader Rob Hardy had a poem, “Jane Austen's Toes,” published in The Apple Valley Review’s Fall 2007 issue. The poem (apparently inspired by a line in Carol Shields’ biography of Jane Austen) is quite lovely in our opinion and beats that Kipling fellow’s mash-poems about Jane all cold. [...]
Garden Voices (Free subscription) | 07/03/2007
This passage from The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields sums up, not only the garden I'd love to eventually have, but how I feel about it at this particular moment in time. . . . reBlogged to gardens...
John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot (Free subscription) | 06/27/2007
Guilt has the power to extract merciless sacrifices.- Carol Shields...
