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    Various Miracles: Stories
    Unavailable
    Various Miracles: Stories
    Unavailable
    Various Miracles: Stories
    Ebook216 pages2 hours

    Various Miracles: Stories

    By Carol Shields

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The small miracles of our day-to-day lives are on captivating display in this unforgettable collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields
    Various Miracles     brings together twenty-one short stories, modern parables that illuminate the mysteries of everyday existence.
    In the title story, four strangers on a bus are all reading the same book. In “Fragility,” Ivy’s husband reflects on their marriage, the death of their young son, Christopher, and the plane ride that will deliver them to a new life.
    From “The Metaphor Is Dead – Pass It On” to “Home” to “Others”—in which a couple’s act of generosity is repaid in annual Christmas cards with no return address—this collection is by turns witty, inventive, and moving. Whether portraying a violinist yearning to break free of overprotective parents or an elderly widow mowing her lawn to the thunderous timpani of memory, Carol Shields depicts the struggles of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. It’s a world where magic coexists with reality, and where leaps of faith and acts of kindness create their own miracles.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateDec 17, 2013
    ISBN9781480459595
    Unavailable
    Various Miracles: Stories
    Author

    Carol Shields

    Carol Shields’s novels include Unless; Larry’s Party, winner of The Women’s Prize; The Stone Diaries, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Republic of Love; Happenstance; and Mary Swann. Dressing Up for the Carnivaland Various Miracles, collections of short stories, were later published as The Collected Stories. Brought up in Chicago, Shields lived in Canada from 1957 until her death in 2003.

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    Reviews for Various Miracles

    3/5

    2 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This collection of gentle and engaging stories was a joy to read, cover to cover. Carol Shields highlights ordinary characters in everyday circumstances, but as the title implies, she weaves in an element of the not-quite-normal in each vignette. Her writing in this collection is marked by an optimistic realism with a nod to the idea that coincidences allude to a more significant connections between people and circumstances than we often are willing to observe. It's not all peaches and cream or happy endings, there is reality in the mundanity, but the life of each of the quirky characters is tainted by just a hint of the surreal.

      I love Shields' writing style and her attention to detail alongside enduring wisdom is evident in her carefully crafted stories. Some of the stories fell a little flat for me, others grew a bit too monotonous or boring. But each character/life study afforded a perspective from which I wanted to see, and in that, it is a truly impressive and lovely collection.
    • 3/5
      LIked it, didn't love it. Prefer her novels - which in a sense tie a number of linked short stories together.