Dressing Up for the Carnival is Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Shields's third collection of stories and 12th work of fiction, and anyone who imagines that all this time the remarkable author of Larry's Party and The Stone Diaries has been holding back a few sparks of her peculiar genius is incorrect. It's not sparks but flames she's been tending in secret. These 22 stories emerge from a state of willful, artistic derangement in which the wry despair and vexed compassion of Shield's other works erupt in weird, extravagant light—and not simply for the fun of it but because they need to.

Behind this book lies the recognition that all the good things of this world need fresh encouragement if they are not to be overtaken by the bad things threatening to wipe them out. The world's woes are not articulated here, but the sadness to which they give rise is this book's quiet underpinning. Still, if what we see on the news invites desperation, Shields gives that desperation a mind-altering adrenaline rush. To make sense of things isn't advisable now, she might explain. Better to unhinge them and see them as they would be, instead of as they are.

A surreal intersection between rhapsody and lamentation is where this collection resides. What happens in the story “Windows,” for instance, when the government levies a tax on glass? To up the ante, the story is told by a painter, married to a second painter, their house and studio a celebration of daylight until they need to board up the windows to save cash. “Inside was trapped the darkness of a primitive world” followed by “a curious amnesia of the self … We kept to our separate corners … this was a flat, dull width of time.” Without passion, too, until the painter forgoes her dark canvas and paints the boarded-up window instead. Like many of these stories, “Windows” pays homage to the resourcefulness of love. “One of us reached forward to apply a final brushstroke … not real light … but the idea of light—infinitely more alluring than light itself.”

Likewise, in “Absence” a writer whose word processor no longer includes a certain vowel, and who finds that “the broken key [demands] of her a parallel surrender,” asks “why … had she stayed so long enclosed by the tough, lonely pronoun of her body when the whole world beckoned?” In “Harp” a woman injured by a falling harp is “awarded the unexpected buoyancy of flight,” and in “Mirrors” a man and woman who decide to rid their house of mirrors find themselves unable to look away from each other, their eyes “caught on the thread of a shared joke … at home behind the screen of each other's face.” “Weather” tells of a couple weathering the time when not only the meteorologists but the climate go on strike, and in “Soup du Jour” a forgetful child sent shopping for celery feels “thunderous” gratitude, freed of the “confines of the … everyday world to which … he has been condemned.”

“We cannot live without our illusions,” declares one of the characters in this book, but what is significant here is that illusion is neither defense nor escape. Rather, it is transformative, and in story after story these whimsical characters stake their hopes, and their hearts, on it. Whether they choose to do so, or are helpless not to do so, is a question neither openly posed nor resolved. But from fantasy springs a kind of necessary innocence. These narrators are painstakingly gullible, instantly credulous of the strangest events. What's more they never once pause to question, or to doubt, their own significance but rather indulge in a delighted self-consciousness that mirrors Shields's own.

Along with being an important work, Dressing Up for the Carnival is an endlessly levitating entertainment. The narrator of “Invention” proudly claims to be descended from the inventor of the comma and to be related to the inventor of the hyphen as well. She also claims lineage with the inventor of daydreams. “Some of us are needed who merely keep the historical record,” she adds, though “sometimes we risk our small emendations.” This book insists upon an emended world, and we should be humbly delighted to be ever so distantly related to the person who created it.