W.P. Kinsella

W.P. Kinsella

Canadian author W.P. Kinsella was born in 1935 on a farm in Northern Alberta and did not receive his B.A. in creative writing until he was thirty-nine. Before that, Kinsella held a series of odd jobs including working as a taxi driver, selling insurance, and managing a restaurant. While he began writing short fiction at seventeen, Kinsella did not see publication until 1979 with his work Dance Me Outside. He became a sensation in 1982 with Shoeless Joe, a novel about an Iowa man who digs up part of his cornfield in order to build a baseball field. This novel was an elaboration of his short story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and was made into the popular film Field of Dreams in 1989.

Featured Books By Author

The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories

Shortstops who run with the wolves, painted eggs that reveal deeply disturbing meanings, long-dead Hall of Famers who miraculously return to the game, an Iowa minor-league town with a secret conspiracy: these are the elements from which W.P. Kinsella weaves nine fabulous stories about the magical world of baseball.

From the dugouts, clubhouses, bedrooms, and barrooms to the interior worlds of hope and despair, these eerie stories present the absurdities of human relationships and reveal the writer's special genius for touching the heart

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If Wishes Were Horses

If Wishes Were Horses is another literary baseball classic from best-selling author of Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella.

Joe McCoy is an unemployed journalist who in a strange twist of fate, ends up as a fugitive running from the FBI. Without many other options, Joe goes home to Iowa to try to seek out the only two men who just might be able to help him. Ray Kinsella (from Shoeless Joe) and Gideon Clarke (from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy).

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Box Socials

Here's the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock, a small-town greaser whose claim to fame was hitting a baseball clean across the Pembina River, almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals—but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller of Cleveland Indian fame in Renfrew Park, Edmonton Alberta. Along the way to Al's moment of truth at the plate, we learn about the bizarre, touchingly hilarious lives and loves of just about anyone who ever passed through New Oslo, Fark, or Venusberg.

Full of the crackle of down-home folk tales, by turns randy, riveting, and heart-breaking, Box Socials is the triumph of Kinsella's career.

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Books By
W.P. Kinsella