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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Japanese Baseball and Other Stories

Kinsella weaves his characters into the thrill of the game, be it in Japan, Central America, Canada or the U.S., with a variety of comic, tragic, and mystical results. This collection captures the dazzling wit, compelling insight, and obsession with baseball that have made Kinsella more popular than a ballpark frank.
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Books By
W.P. Kinsella