SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “An Endangered Species.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 11 (29 June 2000): 38-41.

In the following review, Oates discusses Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival along with several other recent story collections by various authors. Oates comments that Shields's stories are intelligent, provocative, and entertaining.

The short story is a minor art form that, in the hands of a very few practitioners, becomes major art. Its effect is rarely isolated or singular, but accumulative; a distinguished story collection is one that is greater than the mere sum of its disparate parts. In isolation, striking and original as individual stories might be, it's likely that they would quickly fade from literary memory, as a few scattered poems of Emily Dickinson, separated from the poet's great body of work, would have long since faded into oblivion.

Yet one might argue that collections of short fiction have been among...