In her introductory remarks at a reading at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto, Carol Shields remarked on her frustration at the critics' tendencies to focus on the “ordinary” in her works. In response to this incessant focus she read “Soup du Jour,” a story from her recent collection Dressing Up for the Carnival. The parodic story begins: “Everyone is coming out these days for the pleasures of ordinary existence. Sunsets. Dandelions. Fencing in the backyard and staying home. ‘The quotidian is where it's at,’ Herb Rhinelander recently wrote in his nationwide syndicated column. ‘People are getting their highs on the roller coaster of everydayness, dipping their daily bread in the soup of common delight and simple sensation.’” This is the playful beginning to a sad story about life, love, and obsessive counting. As in most of the other stories in this collection, Shields flouts the conventions of ordinariness but she does not relinquish them. By the end of the story we still know about all the ingredients required in the soup. This is a slow read, not because of the density of prose or the complexity of plots, but because it is best to read the stories in isolation from each other. These stories are emphatically not linked. That this is not a page-turner is its success.

While several of the stories are extrapolations on “what if” stories (what if Roman ruins were found in southern Manitoba, what if meteorologists went on strike, what if you have a sexual encounter at a dinner party with a man you've just met), the best ones are imagistic flashes. Shields shares with poetic imagism a focus on crisp, clear, precise, concentrated images and an emphasis on clearing away the clutter. This is well illustrated in the title story. It is a series of portraits of characters: “A Passionate, Vibrant Woman About To Begin Her Day. Her Life”; a man carrying a mango in his left hand; a bank teller fantasizing about an empty baby stroller; a young woman reading a great classic; and an anonymous middle-aged citizen who waltzes about his bedroom in his wife's lace-trimmed nightgown: “Everywhere he looks he observes cycles of consolation and enhancement, and now it seems as though the evening itself is about to alter its dimensions, becoming more (and also less) than what it really is.” This is a fitting metaphor for this book of short stories. If Shields writes about sunsets and dandelions, detailing the “pleasures of ordinary existence,” she places them beside observations on “cycles of consolation and enhancement.” She presents more and less what really is.

The stories range from accounts of love to a report on ceremonial foods. There is the whimsical story, written without the letter “I,” about a writer who must write a story without the letter “I.” There is the story of an artist's response to the darkness and light that ensues after the government imposes a window tax. There is the story of the weather-less state that comes out of a strike by the National Association of Meteorologists and the love in a marriage that is restored when the strike is over. Perhaps most beautifully, there is the story of an author's odyssey to buy the perfect scarf for her daughter. Only one story in this collection, “Flatties,” falls flat. Shields is not at her strongest in this fantastic landscape. Her vignettes about the inconsistencies of love, the way lovers stumble onto each other, and the long-haul nature of marriage provide more satisfying reading.

The collection goes well beyond exploring the intricacies of love, though. As if responding to the inadequacies of contemporary literary criticism, Shields also engages with misreadings in many of the stories. Perhaps the sharpest criticism of a misreading comes in “Edith-Esther.” It is a story about the imposition of a persona on an eighty-year-old writer by her official biographer. Echoing the famous story of why Alice Munro chose to have a character dressed in brown (not because of its earthy connotations, but rather, because she liked brown), Edith-Esther is admonished by her biographer because she has always “rejected any sense of subtext” when she attempts to explain her own phrase, “her lips form a wound in the flesh,” as a reference to chapped lips or perhaps even cold sores rather than as a reference to the wounds of Christ. The biographer is so heavily invested in portraying her “kernel of authenticity” by recreating her as a spiritual woman that he ignores her avowed repudiations of religion. Shields, however, seems particularly determined to suppress outdated notions of authorial authenticity. In a sense, she has answered the readers who have misread her work as a simple fleshing out of the quotidian by presenting a collection that intensely points to her own forays into experimentation with narrative structure in Happenstance, Swann, and The Stone Diaries.

Reading Getting Lucky, Matt Cohen's posthumously published final collection of short stories, is like reading his canon in miniature. It brings to summation a lifetime of writing. Several of the stories, including the title story, “Darwin's Jars”, “Napoleon in Moscow” and “The Anatomy of Insects,” evoke the Eastern Ontario landscape of Cohen's Salem novels of the 1970s and of Elizabeth and After, the novel published shortly before his death in 1999. In “The Anatomy of Insects”, an unusual story about a son coming to terms with his father's death, Cohen writes: “At some point in the last few miles the landscape has shifted. A sudden transition Lawrence never expects, never remembers, but it always arrives this way, and once he has come this far, to this place that is home, the loose whirring keys align themselves, lock into position, thunk, and suddenly he is whole again, home again, back to the place he is always so eager to escape, so reluctant to return.” In this and many other stories, geography and landscape are intertwined with a reluctant sense of peace, comfort, and home.

Glimpses of Cohen's other work can be seen throughout. As in Dressing Up for the Carnival, these stories are technically diverse. They range from the stark realism in a story about a man who must choose between a family he loves and a cabin he needs, to the macabre elegance of a story written in the tone of Freud: The Paris Notebooks about a boy, his father (the “literary executioner”), and Dostoyevsky. (As if to anchor even “Inventing Dostoyevsky” in some kind of reality, Cohen describes at length the sound of the thin chocolate coating of chocolate marshmallow cookies cracking between teeth.) Further, the whimsy in the story of Stephen Leacock's private secretary is reminiscent of the humour evident particularly in Café Le Dog. The meek English teacher, Winter, is clearly a descendant of the ineffectual professor in Nadine (although not as disconcertingly compelling). Missing from the collection, however, is the sadness of Last Seen. These stories were completed when Cohen knew that he was dying of lung cancer. However, the collection lacks any kind of morbidity. It seems that he did not want to burden his final fictional work with self-pity or with anger.

These stories are fuller than Shields's tales. The collection reads more like a series of short novels than a row of images. As a result, however, some of the stories are dense and rewarding, while other stories seem incomplete or prematurely finished. On the one hand, “Getting Lucky” and “the Anatomy of Insects,” for example, end with an uncharacteristically neat tying-up of the storylines using rather conventional proposals of marriage. They stop abruptly with an optimism that appears false in the contexts of the stories. “Darwin's Jars,” on the other hand, is a rich twenty-page novella that ends with the haunting image of a country man, Walt, showing off his collection of bones. What seems to be a story about the pleasures of ordinary existence, helping a neighbour's child, becomes a horrific vision. When we enter the barn with the drunken narrator and his host, we are just as surprised as he is to find a human skeleton in a large glass coffin. “Every bone has been meticulously cleaned and varnished. Walt must have taken the whole thing apart, worked on it for weeks or months, then put it back together, just like his reconditioned car.” Polished exhumed human remains are simply, and without comment, compared to a refurbished forty-five-year-old Ford. We are left wondering if this image is meant to be cinematic hyperbole (a theme running throughout the story) or an exposition of the potential for horror inside every character.

Perhaps the most stirring story in the collection is “Edward/Eduardo,” the story of the adoption of a boy from Guatemala and his subsequent disappearance. After telling the story of Kiki—the dog that killed a cat to become a mother—a character asks “Which is the worst part? That the agent was telling me I would kill to be a mother or that because of me Edward would think he was a dog instead of a cat?” The answer, it is clear, is both. The “real worst part” however is “how much everyone enjoyed watching the grotesque spectacle that Kiki and her children provided.” Cohen shows the depth and complexity necessary to write about home. The desperation of motherhood, separation, and desire are presented not as grotesque spectacle, but as elements of the ordinary. While it is true that, like Dressing Up for the Carnival, the quotidian is where it's at in Getting Lucky, it is also true that Cohen is “back in his own country, known rhythms of wind.” Given the controversy over his memoir, Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, this is perhaps his best final legacy.