Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, Carol Shields, neé Warner, immigrated to Canada in 1957 having married the Canadian engineering professor Donald Shields. Prior to her immigration she had earned a B.A. and a Master's degree in Arts from Hanover College, Indiana. In 1975 she graduated with an M.A. from the University of Ottawa. It was only in her forties, after she had raised her five children, that she launched her literary career. Over the years Shields has also traveled and lived in Europe. While working as a writer, she also held the positions of Professor of English at the University of Manitoba and Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She died in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2003 after a long battle with cancer.

Carol Shields is one of those exceptional writers who publish in almost all genres. Not only did she produce three collections of poetry and three plays, she also wrote literary criticism as well as literary biographies and edited an anthology of woman's writing. Shields is best known, however, for her fiction. The latter includes eleven novels — among them Small Ceremonies (1976), Swann: A Mystery (1987), The Stone Diaries (1993), and Larry's Party (1997) — as well as three collections of short stories. In 1993 she received the Governor General's Award for her novel The Stone Diaries (which had also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year), and, being of American nationality as well, Shields was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1995.

In the course of fifteen years, Shields published three collections of short stories, Various Miracles (1985), The Orange Fish (1989), and Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000). Several of the pieces compiled in these collections had appeared earlier in journals and magazines, some of them winning awards. In scholarly analyses of Shields's work, greater emphasis has been given to the novels; moreover, when short fiction is considered, it is often explored in relation to the novels. Hence it does not come as a surprise that the same or similar aspects are addressed with regard to both genres.