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The Orange Fish
A superb collection of short stories from the author of The Stone Diaries, winner of the Governor General's Award. Emerging from these twelve beautifully articulated stories are portraits of men and women whose affairs and recoveries in life take us into worlds that are both new and yet unnervingly familiar. A smile of recognition and a shock of surprise await readers of these finely crafted stories. From the magical orange fish itself -- enigmatic and without age -- to holiday reunions; from the passions and pains of lovers and friends to the moving uncertainty of a Parisian vacation, this exquisite collection is bound to delight and enchant Carol Shields' fans everywhere.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
3 people are currently reading
209 people want to read
About the author
Carol Shields
71 books663 followersCarol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her successful 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award. Her novel Swann won the Best Novel Arthur Ellis Award in 1988.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 27, 2024
I am rereading Shields’s short stories for the first quarter of 2024: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. My review of the first one, Various Miracles (1985), is here. The Orange Fish followed four years later. It’s a shorter book – 12 stories rather than 21 – but again opens with the title story, which features a gentle slide into absurdity. The members of a select group think their possession of an orange fish lithograph makes them special, and the sense of being chosen enlivens and rejuvenates them. But when the artwork becomes widely available, it devalues their joy in it. This reminded me of a statistic I’ve often heard: experiments show that people don’t want to be earning a particular amount of money; they want to be earning comfortably relative to others.
“Today Is the Day” stands out for its fable-like setup: “Today is the day the women of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies.” With the ritualistic activity and the arcane language, it seems borne out of women’s secret history; if it weren’t for mentions of a few modern things like a basketball court, it could have taken place in medieval times.
European settings recur in a few stories, and there are more third-person POVs than first-. And surprise! A character from Various Miracles is back: Meershank, the writer from “Flitting Behaviour,” stars in “Block Out.” Here Shields inverts the fear of writer’s block: for this prolific scribbler it’s a welcome break. “The suffering of the throttled was his, and he felt appropriately shriven, haunted, beset and blessed.”
In both “Collision” and “Family Secrets,” Shields muses on the biographer’s art, asking what passes into the historical record. The former involves a brief encounter between Martä and Malcolm, a visiting consultant, in Eastern Europe. I loved the mischievous personification: “Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces.” In “Family Secrets,” the narrator remembers that, before marriage, her mother took a year off teaching for “sickness,” and wonders if it was actually a pregnancy, hidden as assiduously as two amputations in the family. “Lies, secrets, casual misrepresentations and small failures of memory, all these things are useful in their way. History gobbles everything up willy-nilly”. Ernest Hemingway also makes a fun cameo appearance in this one.
I had three favourites: 1) “Hinterland” has a married couple visiting Paris at a time of terrorist activity. (There’s a fantastic list of the random things Roy might have thought of while fleeing the bomb threat, but didn’t.) The combination of that and a museum setting of course made me think of The Goldfinch. But it seems like the greater threats here are ageing and potential breakdowns within the family. “Milk Bread Beer Ice,” the last story in the collection, is also travel-based and contrasts the wife’s love of words with this marriage’s fundamental failure of communication. 2) “Hazel,” one I mistakenly read last month, is an example of Shields’s abiding interest in happenstance and how it changes a life’s direction.
And my overall favourite, 3) “Fuel for the Fire,” a lovely festive-season story that gets beyond the everything-going-wrong-on-a-holiday stereotypes, even though the oven does play up as the narrator is trying to cook a New Year’s Day goose. The things her widowed father brings along to burn on their open fire – a shed he demolished, lilac bushes he took out because they reminded him of his late wife, bowling pins from a derelict alley – are comical yet sad at base, like so much of the story. “Other people might see something nostalgic or sad, but he took a look and saw fuel.” Fire is a force that, like time, will swallow everything.
Being a significantly shorter collection than Various Miracles, The Orange Fish seems to contain less filler and so struck me as stronger overall. There were only maybe one or two stories that I was less engaged with, and the themes of art, biography, coincidence, marriages and writers reminded me of works by some of my favourite authors, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and David Lodge.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
“Today Is the Day” stands out for its fable-like setup: “Today is the day the women of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies.” With the ritualistic activity and the arcane language, it seems borne out of women’s secret history; if it weren’t for mentions of a few modern things like a basketball court, it could have taken place in medieval times.
European settings recur in a few stories, and there are more third-person POVs than first-. And surprise! A character from Various Miracles is back: Meershank, the writer from “Flitting Behaviour,” stars in “Block Out.” Here Shields inverts the fear of writer’s block: for this prolific scribbler it’s a welcome break. “The suffering of the throttled was his, and he felt appropriately shriven, haunted, beset and blessed.”
In both “Collision” and “Family Secrets,” Shields muses on the biographer’s art, asking what passes into the historical record. The former involves a brief encounter between Martä and Malcolm, a visiting consultant, in Eastern Europe. I loved the mischievous personification: “Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces.” In “Family Secrets,” the narrator remembers that, before marriage, her mother took a year off teaching for “sickness,” and wonders if it was actually a pregnancy, hidden as assiduously as two amputations in the family. “Lies, secrets, casual misrepresentations and small failures of memory, all these things are useful in their way. History gobbles everything up willy-nilly”. Ernest Hemingway also makes a fun cameo appearance in this one.
I had three favourites: 1) “Hinterland” has a married couple visiting Paris at a time of terrorist activity. (There’s a fantastic list of the random things Roy might have thought of while fleeing the bomb threat, but didn’t.) The combination of that and a museum setting of course made me think of The Goldfinch. But it seems like the greater threats here are ageing and potential breakdowns within the family. “Milk Bread Beer Ice,” the last story in the collection, is also travel-based and contrasts the wife’s love of words with this marriage’s fundamental failure of communication. 2) “Hazel,” one I mistakenly read last month, is an example of Shields’s abiding interest in happenstance and how it changes a life’s direction.
And my overall favourite, 3) “Fuel for the Fire,” a lovely festive-season story that gets beyond the everything-going-wrong-on-a-holiday stereotypes, even though the oven does play up as the narrator is trying to cook a New Year’s Day goose. The things her widowed father brings along to burn on their open fire – a shed he demolished, lilac bushes he took out because they reminded him of his late wife, bowling pins from a derelict alley – are comical yet sad at base, like so much of the story. “Other people might see something nostalgic or sad, but he took a look and saw fuel.” Fire is a force that, like time, will swallow everything.
Being a significantly shorter collection than Various Miracles, The Orange Fish seems to contain less filler and so struck me as stronger overall. There were only maybe one or two stories that I was less engaged with, and the themes of art, biography, coincidence, marriages and writers reminded me of works by some of my favourite authors, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and David Lodge.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
August 4, 2008
I'm not sure how long the stories will stay in my mind, but I always find Shields' style beautiful to read. Some of the stories are hopeful, others devastatingly bleak. I especially like the title story and 'Hazel'.
January 29, 2015
Carol Shields has been one of my favourite authors for a long time. I especially love 'The Stone Diaries', 'Larry's Party', and 'Unless'. I had never read any of her short stories so I picked up this collection. It was published in 1989 so it contains her earlier works. One of my favourite stories in this collection is 'The Orange Fish'. It is the story of an unhappy couple who buys a signed print of an orange fish and it turns slightly absurd as they join a group of people who also own signed prints of this picture and they sit around and talk about what it means to them. But the picture is turned into posters and thousands of them are printed and it no longer has the magic it once held. Several of her stories are about unhappy couples and family secrets. Though I would not put this collection in with my favourites, still they are written by Carol Shields and I will always recommend her to everyone.
February 18, 2013
I was disappointed. I have been a great fan of her novels, so I had high expectations. Each story was of course, beautifully written. Each story had a reality , a truth which was presented in an artful way. Yet each story disappointed me. Maybe that was the point. "Milk, Beer, Bread and Ice", the last story was aptly named and too bleak but certainly had lots of truth.
If you're reading for a good time or a neat plot, don't select any of these stories. If you want to be a bit depressed , these stories, any of them, are perfect. "The Orange Fish" is life changing,or is it? This collection of stories were too modern .
If you're reading for a good time or a neat plot, don't select any of these stories. If you want to be a bit depressed , these stories, any of them, are perfect. "The Orange Fish" is life changing,or is it? This collection of stories were too modern .
October 5, 2008
I love Carol Shields' way with words. In every story I've read by her, there's always at least one phrase that jumps out at me because it's so beautifully written and so apt for what she's conveying. This collection is certainly no different in that respect.
Some of the stories in the collection are much better than others, but there is beauty and truth in each one.
Some of the stories in the collection are much better than others, but there is beauty and truth in each one.
September 14, 2017
Shields' usual amazing craft.
December 29, 2025
perhaps comparison is the death of happiness, but this didn’t exactly measure up to dead girls, the most recent amalgamation of short stories i read. shield’s writing was good, but i didn’t love that her stories didn’t have a real meaning - a lot of them were mundane and didn’t really have much purpose. i did laugh out loud a few times and this was the first book i ever found myself underlining some sentences (i liked that). most of the stories i can’t really remember. it was good writing, but nothing to write home about.
December 3, 2025
I’m not sure what it is about short stories, but I’m drawn to them, especially the good ones. What makes one ‘good,’ I can’t exactly say. I’ve had mixed reactions to Carol Shields books over the years, ranging from amazing (Larry's Party, The Stone Diaries) to… hmmm. This collection landed firmly in the ‘hmmm’ category.
August 14, 2024
DNF after 130 pages. Most of the stories are about women in their fifties, go no where, and just didn’t resonate for me. I’ve read two of Sheila’s novels which were merely okay but I probably won’t read any more of her.
March 5, 2018
An interesting collection of short stories depicting everyday human experiences and conditions, by a Canadian Author.
general-fiction
September 3, 2019FIC
SHE
SHE
February 10, 2023
Not sure what i was expecting with this. Some of the short stories where really good others i didn’t care for. Only one was actually about an orange fish.
August 13, 2023
Short stories, mostly featuring family dynamics and inner lives. Easy to read one or two at a sitting.
December 4, 2021
Beautiful writing and well-crafted stories. Some characters were engaging; some not so much, but that’s the nice thing about short stories. They end soon enough that it doesn’t really matter. All the same I didn’t love the book; I just don’t think it’s what I needed to read right now.
June 7, 2014
And this is the only other time you will see me definitely use the cliché 'Sublime'.
Authors choose titles for a reason.
In choosing The Orange Fish as the title of this novel Carol has given away her greatest gift, her trade secret. Her craft of her craftiness.
She has the gift of turning the everyday into something magical, symbolic, epiphiphantastic.
In Carol's writing is what we forget in our rush to get have want need. That everything is a message guiding us. That all we need is within us. In the small things. The moments between events. The looks, glances, postures, sighs less the dialogue, gunshots or explosions.
When you read Carol 'a books you are absorbed as much into your own world as she reveals meaning in the most humble of moments, ones others might not recognize as meaningful.
Maybe most of all she shows us unless we take time to breath we will miss the messages around us. Unless we look we will not see that what we are looking for is already around us, in every object and action waiting to be discovered.
Ah yes, that hanging remainder of all other possibilities,
Unless...
Authors choose titles for a reason.
In choosing The Orange Fish as the title of this novel Carol has given away her greatest gift, her trade secret. Her craft of her craftiness.
She has the gift of turning the everyday into something magical, symbolic, epiphiphantastic.
In Carol's writing is what we forget in our rush to get have want need. That everything is a message guiding us. That all we need is within us. In the small things. The moments between events. The looks, glances, postures, sighs less the dialogue, gunshots or explosions.
When you read Carol 'a books you are absorbed as much into your own world as she reveals meaning in the most humble of moments, ones others might not recognize as meaningful.
Maybe most of all she shows us unless we take time to breath we will miss the messages around us. Unless we look we will not see that what we are looking for is already around us, in every object and action waiting to be discovered.
Ah yes, that hanging remainder of all other possibilities,
Unless...
November 9, 2008
I love Carol Shields, especially her Pulitzer Prize winning, The Stone Diaries. And I bought The Orange Fish hastily thinking it was another great novel. Unfortunately, for me--who is not particularly a short-story fan--this book is a series of twelve unrelated short stories. Each was beautifully written and, as far as short stories go, I am sure they were wonderful. However, since I don't usually read short stories (primarily because they always seem to leave me wanting more in-depth information and more story), I am not Ms. Shields "best reader" in this instance. However, I did like a couple of the stories, found them both amusing and thought provoking, in particular: The Orange Fish and Hazel.
December 15, 2014
I don't enjoy this authors style of writing. Her Short stories are constructed by character development and the beginning of a plot followed by an abrupt ending with the exact opposite feeling the rest of the story had built up. I believe she does this for shock value but it doesn't flow well and her word choice makes her stories sound pretentious.
March 12, 2008
The book I read every March in addition to her "Small Ceremonies" to remind me of the beauty in everyday small things.
August 9, 2009
B+ A great collection of short stories; the characters deal with hope, love, death, and family relations
April 25, 2016
This collection of short stories by Carol Shields is goo, not great. My favourite stories were Family Secrets and Good Manners. They had a melancholy humour to them that I love.
November 5, 2024
Long time coming, I love this book.
August 3, 2016
symbolic meaning
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews