A spotlight on one book, however well-deserved, can cast the rest of a writer's work into shadow. Carol Shields, who has lived in Winnipeg for many years, is known to American readers for her 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. But she is the author of eight earlier novels, and is a poet and playwright as well. To read her is to encounter a restive, experimental writer, one for whom the allures of form are paramount. The final section of Swann (1987), about four critics' discovery of a great unknown poet, purports to be the script of a film made at a literary symposium (the very notion provokes levity), A Celibate Season (1991), written with Blanche Howard, is an epistolary novel. Happenstance (1994), is presented from both a wife's and husband's viewpoint, and has to be turned upside down halfway through.

Given the success of The Stone Diaries, it seems disingenuous to claim that Carol Shields—praised for her “honesty,” “grace,” “humor,” and “depth”—is underappreciated. Yet her fiction isn't discussed with the reverence accorded to her widely known compatriots, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood or Robertson Davies.

Honesty, grace, et al. are often ascribed to able women writers, as are the other virtues of The Stone Diaries that were hailed: generosity of spirit, acuteness of observation, elegance of execution. Such generic praise might have suited Shields' early works, which are pleasing yet not especially distinctive or profound. But her fiction has steadily gained in allusive richness and force. In fact, it has undergone such a sea change that the benign terms no longer sufficiently or specifically describe what is found on the page. Beneath the limpid surface, the animating vision is hardly benign. The world of her last two novels, and even more of her new short stories, Dressing Up for the Carnival, is unsettling, perilous and passing strange.

Larry's Party (1998), the wonderfully eccentric novel that came after The Stone Diaries, was received in the spirit of bland respect that commonly follows a triumph. It deserved better. In it, before hero Larry's birth, his British mother unwittingly causes her mother-in-law's death by botulism, having served her home preserved and inadequately sealed green beans. As a consequence, the family flees England for Canada. They can never utter (or forget) the word “beans.” Larry becomes a builder of ever more complex garden mazes, a metaphor for a life shaped, like most lives, by wrong turns and arbitrary choices, the frivolity of coincidence, the benighted promptings of will and destiny.

The first marriage of Daisy Goodwill, orphaned heroine of The Stone Diaries, lasts all of eight days. On her honeymoon somewhere “in the middle of France,” her drunk husband falls out of an open hotel window before her very eyes while tossing coins to the children below. The marriage is unconsummated—he's been drunk and possibly uninterested all week. Later she marries a man 23 years her senior and passes two mild decades until his death. Neither husband is much missed; they barely registered. “To live frictionlessly in the world,” notes a character in the new story collection, “is to understand the real grief of empty space.”

The event that has registered for Daisy, deeply and perpetually, is her unexpected birth on a kitchen couch. Her mother dies, so obese and innocent that she's been unaware of her pregnancy. Daisy is left unmoored in the world. Nothing that happens later can allay that stern fact. The author's ability to present such bizarre incidents with cool humor only sharpens their terror.

The stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival do not have the specific gravity of Shields' novels; they are altogether something else, more delicate and subtle, more rooted in ideas than in character (unlike her previous fairly conventional collections, Various Miracles [1989] and The Orange Fish [1992]). A good number are finely wrought excursions along a path of metaphorical inquiry—into the meaning of keys, or the difference between invention and interpretation (that is, between artist and critic), or the emotional reverberations of weather. Occasionally the reader gets attached to the characters only to find they are being deployed as mere illustration.

Shields is purposely subverting expectation. “A narrative isn't something you pull along like a toy train, a perpetually thrusting indicative,” one character (a literary critic) declares. “It's this little subjunctive cottage by the side of the road. All you have to do is open the door and walk in. Sometimes you might arrive and find the door ajar. … Other times you crawl in through a window.” In a handful of stories, the window is too narrow, the narrative simply an elaboration of a conceit, the vital material too thinly spread. But at their best, they are virtuoso performances, the sort of thing a writer can risk only when she is fully at ease with her craft.

Shields certainly cannot be described as a minimalist; her imagination is too fertile. But she thinks in terms of technical and emotional economies. A pervasive theme of Dressing Up for the Carnival is deprivation—selective, often voluntary, sometimes imposed. “Emptiness has weight,” one narrator remarks. “Absence gestures at meaning. A doorway is privileged over an actual door in its usefulness and even its beauty—to give a homely example.” In “Keys,” a lonely character is “seized by an impulse to purify her life” and begins throwing her possessions out the window.

The married couple in “Mirrors” decide to do without mirrors in their summer house, a “curious strand of asceticism.” Over the years this renunciation has an unintended result: Mirrorless, they finally see themselves behind each other's faces. Sounds cozy, but it's not: “They still apprehend each other as strangers.”

As in Shields' novels, anatomies of marriages abound. But while the novels generally adhere to the rigors of realism, the stories explode with fantasy and whimsy. In “Weather,” the National Association of Meteorologists goes on strike and all weather stops. “We were suddenly without seasonal zest,” says the wife, “without hourly variation, without surprise and complaint, dislocated in time and space.” This becomes the salient image for a difficult, sometimes arid marriage, but one that intermittently clicks back into connection, the partners as relieved and grateful as they are for the resumption of wind and storms.

The queen of a mythical realm in “Stop!” has renounced everything. Like some pan-allergic people, she can't abide any sensory stimuli, down to “the shape of a spoon in her mouth.” Unable to bear time itself, “she no longer speaks or thinks, since the positioning of noun and verb, of premise and conclusion, demands a progression that invites that toxic essence, that mystery.” But she can't escape the rhythmic beating of her own heart, “insisting on its literal dance.”

Since life does insist on going on, a more practical response to deprivation is making do, a strategy that Shields' novels examine at philosophical leisure and the stories treat swiftly—with a calligrapher's pen as opposed to the muralist's brush. “Everything is coming out these days for the pleasures of ordinary existence. … ‘The quotidian is where it's at,’” she announces, citing an imaginary syndicated columnist (and maybe taking a poke at narrow readings of her own books). Beneath the therapeutic soup making and embroidery and hot baths in “Soup du Jour,” though, is the determined denial of a volatile affair, an unacknowledged child and exile.

The spirit of making do transcends the quotidian in “Windows.” When the government imposes a window tax, forcing people to board up their sources of light and vision, two painters whose love and work are threatened paint a window over their boarded-up one. Beyond relief, it yields an esthetic. “Not real light, of course, but the idea of light—infinitely more alluring than light itself. … a window that had become more than a window, better than a window, the window that would rest in the folds of the mind as all that was ideal and desirable in the opening, beckoning, sensuous world.”

Inquiries into the nature and making of art are the other passionate preoccupations of Dressing Up for the Carnival, from the large metaphor of a better-than-real window, down to the minuscule matter of a broken letter, the “i” on a computer keyboard, that plagues the writer-narrator of “Absence.” How can she write her intended story without “the very letter that attaches to the hungry self?” Frustrated after hours of effort, deprived of the first person pronoun, the gerund, the most common verb, she persists, the absence becoming a challenge like the restrictions of a sonnet or a Rothko palette: “The broken key seemed to demand of her a parallel surrender, a correspondence of economy subtracted from the alphabet of her very self.”

In her own parallel surrender, Shields writers the three-and-a-half page story without using an “i,” an unobtrusive feat that would have been too clever had it gone on any longer. (Although, come to think of it, the French novelist Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, A Void, without the more common “e.”)

Yet another writer-propagandist, bumbling her way through a book tour in “The Scarf,” discovers that even shopping for her daughter, if done properly, can become an art form. “It was the desire to please someone fully, even one's self.” An envious friend fingers the treasured scarf and says, “‘Finding it, it's almost like you made it. You invented it, created it out of your imagination.’” Heartwarming, yes, but hardly the last word. The friend takes possession of the daughter's scarf, leaving the shopper empty-handed. Another deprivation, another absence: “Not one of us was going to get what we wanted.”

About half the main characters in the collection are artists or writers, which can grow claustrophobic. So a witty, circuitous story called “Invention,” about the genesis of art, is a salutary change. It wanders lightheartedly from an account of the invention of the steering wheel muff (by a woman pained to see her husband's hands chilling on the wheel), to a medieval monk's invention of the space between words, to the invention of the hyphen, and culminates with an ancient Greek shepherd boy: Driven by boredom on the job, he discovers that he can dream by day, eyes wide open, as well as by night. “‘A daydream,’ his father says, full of wonder.” “‘You have chanced upon something of great value,’ his mother says.”

A hypersubtle sensibility is something of great value too. Like the scarf her heroine chooses—practically invents—for her daughter, Shields' work is “brilliant and subdued at the same time, finely made, but with a secure sense of its own shape. … Solidity, presence … but in sinuous, ephemeral form.” Some of the stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival are too ephemeral, but in the end the collection is greater than the sum of its parts. It shows a writer who has evolved from competence to mastery, whose imagination is always in search mode, who can transform her “subjunctive cottages” into labyrinthine castles.