Red Plaid Shirt: Stories - Softcover

Schoemperlen, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142003204 ISBN 13: 9780142003206

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2003

Synopsis

A collection of short fiction by the author of Our Lady of the Lost and Found presents twenty-one tales, written over the past twenty years, that include "Losing Ground," a perceptive coming-of-age story, and "The Man of My Dreams," in which the realities of a dissolving relationship become intertwined with the narrator's dream world. Original.

About this title

About the Author:

Diane Schoemperlen is the author of Our Lady of the Lost and Found; In the Language of Love; and five short story collections, including Forms of Devotion, which won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1998; and The Man of My Dreams, which was nominated for a Governor General's Award and a Trillium Award.

From Booklist:

This collection of Schoemperlen's short stories spans 20 years and showcases the gradual evolution of her inventive style. "Losing Ground," written in 1976, is a nostalgic family chronicle whose characters are so carefully limned the reader quickly knows them. Prophetic dreams run in and out of several stories; parental indiscretions and the conundrums of long-standing affairs are common themes. "Modern men . . . were a bunch of malcontents. They wanted too much or too little, or they wanted somebody else altogether," summarizes one weary narrator. The strength of female friendships winds through the title story, as jewel-like vignettes of the narrator's past experiences with abuse, degradation, abortion, and, finally, hope, each now associated with a piece of clothing, are strung together like beads. Later stories rely more on the narrative tricks for which the author is best known, such as forging a clever parody from a common middle-school word problem. It is as if Schoemperlen has changed to a different camera lens but is still zeroing in on those fragments of everyday lives that so often go unnoticed. Deborah Donovan
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0142003204
• ISBN 13: 9780142003206
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320