In her introduction to Carol Shields’s “Collected Stories,” (Fourth Estate, 624 pages, $29.95) Margaret Atwood surmises that Shields’s late-blooming feminism was a response to critics who ignored Shields because her writing was womanly. “She came up against more commentators who thought excellent pastry was a facile creation compared with raw meat on skewers.” Pastry, because Shields’s stories are made of the fresh air and sunshine of comfortable daily life.

In fact, the writing of Shields, who died in 2003, may endure precisely because it embodies a stereotypically feminine, and thus currently underrated, ethic: that of shopping. Her short stories show a transcendent vision of consumer choice, of lifestyle design. What you think of that might depend on what you think of the age we live in.

Shields, whose three collections span the 1980s and 1990s, has been compared to Alice Munro but is quite different. She turns the typical short story on its head. Instead of moments of passive moral epiphany, Shields offers moments of active aesthetic choice. She sees the analogy between our garments and our moods.

Her last collection, “Dressing Up For the Carnival,” contained a story, “Scarf,” about a middle-aged writer who, with time to kill on a book tour, decides to spend an afternoon buying her daughter the perfect scarf. “I had never understood, in fact, what it is that drives other women to feats of shopping perfection, but now I had a suspicion. It was the desire to please someone fully.”

She goes into 20 different boutiques, pursuing what becomes “a dream of transformation.” The narrator feels a “bolt of happiness.” For the first time, the narrator is assuming a new kind of agency; she is not exactly submitting to the consumer lifestyle, but mastering it, and she realizes this is a very different thing.

The notion that design – of decoration, routine, and formal function – is a powerful paradigm for self-awareness infects the slightest details of Shields’s writing. In a story called “Others,” an unhappy woman who sometimes goes to church notes the hymnal phrase “Reclothe me in my rightful mind.” Her final story, “Segue,” is a meditation on the curation of a life: “There, at the market, stimulated, probably, by the hint of frost in the air, I felt a longing to register the contained, isolated instant we had manufactured and entered, the purchase of the delicious hard-crusted bread, the decision over the potted plant – this was what I wanted to preserve.”

There is an element of satire in these stories. Shields may smile at the ease with which a new dress or painting consoles us, but she also looks for more terrible quests for relief, like cross-dressing. One character, a music scholar, contemplates a change in her musical taste: “it might be that she’s putting her own heart beside itself, making comparisons.” Shields recognizes that changes in taste are often less than objective artistic crises. But even if they are little more than strategies for revivication – like a fresh coat of paint – Shields recommends them.

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John Edgar Wideman’s new collection of stories, “God’s Gym” (Houghton Mifflin, 175 pages, $23), is disappointing. The long-breathed sentences that the author of “Philadelphia Fire” loads with African-American slang overpower these stories, many of which are thinly conceived riffs on Mr. Wideman’s autobiography.

In “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence,” a friend of the narrator describes visiting his son in prison. Mr. Wideman’s own brother was sentenced to life, for murder. “It’s then, he said, taking your first steps away from the prison, first steps back into the world, when you almost come apart, almost lose it completely out there in the desert, emptiness stretching as far as the eye can see.”

This sentence, which stretches as far as the eye can see but remains affecting, is eventually lost in a paranoid detective story Mr. Wideman generates to fill out what would otherwise have been a thoroughly felt recollection. It turns out that the narrator’s friend has actually never visited his son. Mr. Wideman does his best to impersonate the absent father, but the son shirks him.

Mr. Wideman’s language is jazz-like, and he sometimes jams too long. Everything that occurs to him is gussied up into a paragraph, often only to be discarded for another thought, which feels to the reader like bait and switch. There are even moments when “God’s Gym” resembles academic writing, with its reflexive allusions and qualifications.

Perhaps it makes sense that in this collection Mr. Wideman is at his best when he is most essayistic. “The Silence of Thelonious Monk” is an essay on the eponymous musical phenomenon, as applied to a lost love affair, with a little Rimbaud and Verlaine thrown in. This kind of risotto-writing would look good alongside William Gass.

But if Mr. Wideman does frustrate, he rewards at the same time: there is some pleasure in getting through the gate-keeping jargon in such phrases as “a conk-haired, redbone, geechee old-timer.”