New Releases by Diane Schoemperlen

New from the Winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Marian Engel Award and the Governor General's Award for English Fiction Once touted as compendiums of human knowledge, the encyclopedias and handbooks of bygone eras now read quaintly, if not comically—yet within their musty pages are often found phrases of uncanny evocative power. Scrupulously stitching such fragments together, in a sequel to the Governor General’s Award-winning Forms of Devotion, By The Book is a collection of verbal and visual collages whose alchemies transform long-dead texts into tales of enduring vitality. With her visually witty full-colour artwork and stories like “What Is A Hat? Where Is Constantinople? Who Was Sir Walter Raleigh? And Many Other Common Questions, Some With Answers, Some Without,” and “Consumptives Should Not Kiss Other People: A Handy Guide to the Care and Maintenance of Your Family’s Good Health,” Schoemperlen’s irreverent and ironic brand of nostalgia combines vintage kitsch with comic, creepy, unexpectedly moving yarns. Praise for By The Book “Diane Schoemperlen's By The Book is a bravura performance. Fragments, collage, assemblage, found poetry - none of the conventional words cover it for they miss the fantastic wit, the energy of humour, the divine ability to find comedic ore in the print detritus of our culture. She doesn't rescue texts; with her wicked sense of irony, she actually puts thought where there was none. She infects the banal with the virus of her own brain and makes it into art. Then she makes a picture of it—oh, dwell upon the details; there are whole novels lurking in the details.”—Douglas Glover Praise for Diane Schoemperlen "Schoemperlen's inventive language and narrative structures encourage readers to be free 'from the prison of everyday thinking."—New York Times Book Review "Lovely, clever [and] imaginative."—Wall Street Journal “Cuttingly witty ... Schoemperlen could almost form a school of piquant and inventive fiction with Julie Hecht, Janet Kauffman, and Lydia Davis.”—Booklist "There is no mistaking a Schoemperlen story—devoted to form, faithful to the mysteries of the everyday."—The Globe & Mail

Remember those math problems where two trains are headed in opposite directions and you need to calculate their positions? Imagine the trains, and then imagine the people in them . . . The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Caught in the middle of two very different love affairs, the narrator must choose between lovers—Dark-and-Brooding or Nice-and-Boring? The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

A woman is marooned in love by her married lover—desperate for him to call, unhappy when he does, she imagines any number of ways to make a change. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

A man and a woman go out for dinner on a snowy night and are nearly run down by an out-of-control car that crashes into the window of an apartment building. Schoemperlen spins out the layered human connections behind this seemingly simple story. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Blurring the line between fact and fiction, this is the story of a woman trying to cope with the news that a former lover has died. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

“I felt myself to be having, after all, one of those dizzying days in which everything can be connected, all ideas can be conjugated and then consumed whole, sense and significance are dropped into your lap like gifts, and the very cast and camber of the air on your cheek is meaningful.” Through the tale of a woman named Sheila, Schoemperlen explores the elusive concept of fiction. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Contemplating the moment when childhood ends and adulthood begins, “Losing Ground” charts a young girl’s yearly pilgrimage “back home” to the town where her mother grew up. As her grandfather nears the end of his life, these trips take on new meaning. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

“Val’s mother always told her, ‘You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.’” For Val, what’s absent from the question seems more important: what do you do if you don’t want a prince at all? The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Young, impressionable, and spending far too much of her summer at her married neighbour’s house, the narrator comes to envy Linda’s life—and her handsome, irresponsible husband—in all the wrong ways. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

The story of life told through the shapes and sizes that define us: pounds gained during pregnancy, the depth of human depression in Earth measurements, and the 21-gram weight of 21 paperclips, neither too light nor too heavy. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

The story of Lesley’s life is told through short stories with trains at the core—walking their tracks, riding to and from home, and finding and losing loves. The stories in Red Plaid Shirt span twenty years of Diane Schoemperlen’s challenging and innovative writing. Told in her fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, they offer a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. This collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in e-book production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Originally published in a 1990 collection of the same name, and later in the anthology Red Plaid Shirt, “The Man of My Dreams” pulls us into a place where we too wonder what is real and what is dreamed, and how our dreams reflect love, loss, and everyday life. Red Plaid Shirt shines with Diane Schoemperlen’s fresh and often deadpan comedic voice, offering a compulsively readable mix of deeply felt emotion and finely wrought intellect. The collection was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award. HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

In a “he said, she said” story, the writer always gets the last word. She is a writer, established and successful, with a full life and supportive friends. Then he walks into a book signing and back into her life 30 years after he broke her heart. This time, things seem different. The pair reconnects through emails, messages and fragments of conversation. But love leaves her with a nasty case of writer’s block. Looking for inspiration in the texts around her -- optimistic horoscopes, evasive fortune cookies and the inane suggestions from books on writer’s block -- she tries to find a way through the relationship that has seemingly stolen her gift for language. Spinning us through the whirlwind love of her nameless protagonist, award-winning author Diane Schoemperlen weaves a stylish, innovative novel out of to-do lists and text messages. Exploring the different emotional languages spoken by men and women, At A Loss For Words is a charming take on the modern romance, warm and witty right through to its surprising and delicious resolution.

A tribute to the people who lost their lives in the September 11 terrorist attacks seeks to bestow individuality on each victim with a listing of every name and a narrative of the day's events.

Drawing upon a wide range of themes, subjects, and styles, this dynamic collection of short fiction is offered by the author of "Our Lady of the Lost and Found."

One Monday morning in April, a middle-aged writer walks into her living room to water the plants and finds a woman standing beside her potted fig tree. Dressed in a navy blue trench coat and white Nikes, the woman introduces herself as "Mary. Mother of God.... You know. Mary." Instead of a golden robe or a crown, she arrives bearing a practical wheeled suitcase. Weary after two thousand years of adoration and petition, Mary is looking for a little R & R. She's asked in for lunch, and decides to stay a week. As the story of their visit unfolds, so does the story of Mary-one of the most complex and powerful female figures of our time-and her changing image in culture, art, history, as well as the thousands of recorded sightings that have placed her everywhere from a privet hedge to the dented bumper of a Camaro. As this Everywoman and Mary become friends, their conversations, both profound and intimate, touch upon Mary's significance and enduring relevance. Told with humor and grace, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is an absorbing tour through Mary's history and a thoughtful meditation on spirituality, our need for faith, and our desire to believe in something larger than ourselves.

Satirical essays and stories. The essay, How to Write a Serious Novel about Love, is a spoof on writing schools, while the story, Count Your Blessings, is on a woman depressed by her perfect marriage.

In this astonishingly inventive novel, Diane Schoemperlen uses the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test as a narrative framework for exploring her heroine's growing understanding of the meaning of love. A tour de force of wit and wordplay, In the Language of Love is a wise and compassionate collage of one woman's coming of emotional age.