Canadian Drama, Family/Domestic Drama, Love & Relationships - Drama

Anniversary

Name: Anniversary
Author: Carol Shields, Dave Williamson
ISBN: 9780921368816

by Carol Shields, Dave Williamson

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Overview

Did you know that one of the world's best-loved novelists is also an acclaimed playwright? Carol Shields has been delighting audiences for years with her plays, among them, Departures & Arrivals, Thirteen Hands, and Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (all available from Blizzard). In her plays, Carol's familiar readers will discover a whole new facet to this award-winning author of eight novels, including The Stone Diaries, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. In writing for the stage, Carol Shields combines the unparalleled elegance of her prose with an uncanny sense of the ironic, and a devilish penchant for comedy. Her plays push the conventional boundaries of social protocol, upsetting the usual aesthetic of introspection.

About the Author, Carol Shields, Dave Williamson

Carol Shields

In her empathetic, elegantly wrought novels, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields portrayed a world very much like our own: at times confusing, painful, and joyous, and populated with characters as complex as those we know in life. Shields passed away on July 16, 2003 after a long battle with breast cancer, leaving a formidable literary legacy.

Biography

Carol Shields's characters are often on the road less traveled, and the trip is never boring. She has written about a folklorist, a poet, a maze designer, a translator, even other writers -- appropriate professions in novels in which characters struggle to find their own paths in life.

Shields often focused on female characters, most notably in The Stone Diaries, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel documenting the birth, death, and everything in between of Daisy Goodwill. Goodwill's story is told over a century, in various voices, featuring Shields's wry humor and her ability to convey what she has called "the arc of human life."

But don't pigeonhole Shields as a "women's writer." "I have directed a fair amount of energy and rather a lot of rage into that particular corner [of the] problem of men and women, particularly men and women who write and how women's novels are perceived differently from men's," Shields said in a 2001 interview. In 1997's Larry's Party, she swapped genders, writing from the perspective of a male floral designer who discovers a passion for mazes.

Unafraid to experiment with genres, Shields wrote an epistolary novel (A Celibate Season, coauthored with Blanche Howard), a sort of "literary mystery" about the posthumous discovery of a murdered poet's genius (Swann), and short stories (collected in Dressing for the Carnival and other titles). Though she often covered serious topics, she rarely did so without humor. Her novel of mid-life romance, Republic of Love, was called by The New York Times a "touching, elegantly funny, luscious work of fiction," an assessment that could be applied to the bulk of her work.

Shields changed her viewpoint yet again for Unless, but the circumstance was a tragic one. The book, which resurrects the main character from Dressing Up for the Carnival's "A Scarf," was written during the author's battle with breast cancer. "I never want to sound at all mystical about writing,'' she said in a 2002 interview, ''but this book -- it just came out." Though not touching on her own illness, Shields did what she had always done -- took her own questions and lessons, then used them to produce a story that speaks its own truth.

Shields passed away on July 16, 2003; she was 68.