Various Miracles
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The stories collected here offer an entrancing look at some of the various miracles of everyday life, the quirks of chance and coincidence, life's setbacks and improvisations. Carol Shields deftly draws us into the lives of a broad range of sharply observed characters, from the brilliant young violinist smothered by an overprotective family, to the elderly widow mowing her lawn while a long, passionate life buzzes around in her memory.
Blending wit and compassion, Shields illuminates moments when ordinary people face extraordinary circumstances, declarations of love and revelations that transform their lives. Sharp, skeptical and sympathetic, this collection presents Shields at her inimitable best in twenty-one miracles of the storyteller's art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 21 stories in this maddeningly uneven collection replay a single theme: people's ``obliviousness to the million invisible filaments of connection, trivial or profound, which bind them one to the other and to the small green planet they call home.'' In a terrain perhaps imitative of the magical realism charted by Borges, Calvino et al., characters--a high percentage of whom are writers--are buffeted by extravagant coincidences and impossible phenomena. Shields ( Small Ceremonies ) is an ambitious writer; she demands of herself a rich poetics and, for these pieces, the virtues of the fable or moral tale. Her efforts are undermined: an authorial omniscience comes across as smug (especially when she twits her writer-characters for self-satisfaction), her doggedly imaginative plots as overdetermined and precious. Given their very similar characters, narrative strategies and subjects, most of these stories read like practice exercises for the two or three that are fully achieved (``Scenes'' is one)--but, in light of the difficulty of her task, these successes distinguish Shields as worthy of serious attention.
