Best Selling Books by Diane Schoemperlen

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.

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 brilliant interplay between words and images informs this collection of stories, in which devotion is explored in its many forms.

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.

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

We’ve seen the pictures and heard their names. But the staggering number of September 11, 2001 terror attack victims overwhelms the individual stories of the men and women who left home that morning never to return. And with this deeply moving tribute, Diane Schoemperlen both bestows individuality to each and connects us all. As she says in her preface, “There is an immediate recognition in the power of naming.”A tapestry of every name and a narrative of events crafted with a novelist’s keen observational eye, the story of this day of loss becomes a celebration of life. Accompanying the names of the victims is an imaginative framework of fragments based on facts—relationships, hobbies, hopes for the future, the textures and basic endeavors of human life. Written in spellbinding prose, Names of the Deadis at once a work of literary art and a haunting elegy that captures the magnitude of an unforgettable event.

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.

Through short bursts of almost statistical information, Schoemperlen paints an ironic portrait of small-town Canada, where people are almost always unhappy in marriage, besieged by tourists looking for directions, and pretending to be happy giving dinner parties. 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“On Monday I decided to change my life.” In Schoemperlen’s addictive tale, Cynthia gives up all constructs of modern life except her yoghurt maker and cappuccino machine, and starts a personal revolution. 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.

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.

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.

Howard is a playwright masquerading as a shoe salesman. Miriam, his wife-but-not-wife, spends her days fantasizing about a trip to Spain. Wandering the house in a blue bathrobe, she practices her Spanish, collects mementoes of Spain, and dreams of bullfights. 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 complex, tense relationship between a young woman’s mother, father, and her mother’s friend, Rita, plays out while Hockey Night in Canada airs on the TV in the background. 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.

Diane Schoemperlen has been described variously as “one of the most vibrant and original voices in our literature,” “incredibly intelligent and observant,” “funny,” and “creatively innovative.”She was the 1998 winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Forms of Devotion, her collection of short stories and pictures. And her most recent novel, the bestselling Our Lady of the Lost and Found, is being simultaneously released in trade paperback as this newest collection appears on the shelves. With Red Plaid Shirt, Schoemperlen shows that she is a writer at the top of her form – an intriguing, wonderfully shape-shifting one, at that. Red Plaid Shirt presents 21 perfectly formed stories, a blend of favorites, out-of-print pieces and new work, all displaying Schoemperlen’s trademark wit, subtle irony and gift for turning everyday domesticities into dynamic, provocative prose. “Losing Ground”is a coming-of-age story in which a teenage girl starts to see herself as separate from her family. In “This Town,” Schoemperlen creates a witty newcomers’ guidebook to an ordinary town – complete with handy cross-references. In “A Simple Story,” a tale of a man and his mistress is gradually uncovered, as a seemingly simple car accident unravels an epic tangle of lives and loves. As always, these are compulsively readable stories, deliciously difficult to resist, proving once again that Schoemperlen’s voice is as fresh, funny, and electric as ever.

Eccentric and living happily alone, Helen is an oddity and a mystery in her town. When she goes on her annual trip to the city, her house is left empty—the perfect target for a thief who knows her habits. While Helen enjoys the luxuries of the city, the thief roams her home, discovering innocent objects with immense history and meaning, if not necessarily monetary worth. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. Forms of Devotion is a playful, sometimes surreal, and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places, and things. 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.

“If a story is not to be about love, then I think it must be about fear.” On her way to meet a friend for lunch, the narrator thinks back over her life, wondering if it is fear or anger that she feels. 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.

Two rooms are blue, one is brown, one is green, one is purple with small clocks—but four walls cannot wholly contain a life or a great love. This succession of poetic, architectural descriptions captures the stages and emotions of a life. But was there a murder? 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.

On a Monday morning in April, a middle-aged writer finds a woman standing in front of the fig tree in her living room. The woman is wearing a navy blue trench coat and white Nikes, and is carrying a small black suitcase. She is the Virgin Mary and, she explains, after 2,000 years of petition, adoration and travel, she is in need of some R&R. In Our Lady of the Lost and Found, Diane Schoemperlen has created a profound and original novel that captures the hearts and imagination of readers. Now available with a P.S. section featuring insightful background material, this captivating story is an exploration of our capacity for faith and of the miracles of daily life.

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.

Naomi Smith, a schoolteacher, is unlucky in love. With a penchant for travel, she finds herself lying on a beach on a remote island, when a local man named Iquito suddenly kisses the small of her back. 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.

From the Governor General’s Award winning author of Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found and By the Book “Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.” For almost six turbulent years, award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen was involved with a prison inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The relationship surprised no one more than her. How do you fall in love with a man with a violent past? How do you date someone who is in prison? This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart. While no relationship takes place in a vacuum, this is never more true than when that relationship is with a federal inmate. In this candid, often wry, sometimes disturbing memoir, Schoemperlen takes us inside this complex and difficult relationship as she journeys through the prison system with Shane. Not only did this relationship enlarge her capacity for both empathy and compassion, but it also forced her to more deeply examine herself.

A woman looks at her life and the many things that influence one’s perspective—how the fifth occurrence of something can be worse than the first, if only because it has become tiring, and how the future, like the horizon, always seems far away, never quite to be reached. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. Forms of Devotion is a playful, sometimes surreal, and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places, and things. 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.

Their relationship is expressed through physical sensation—on good days she kisses him goodbye, lets him wrap his arms around her, touches him with her small hands; on bad days his stomach ties in knots, his legs ache, and he cannot truly see her no matter how wide he opens his eyes. He thinks he knows why there are so many bad days, but he won’t ask—he can feel it in his bones, and someday he will have to get it through his head. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. Forms of Devotion is a playful, sometimes surreal, and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places, and things. 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.

Teaching us to avoid character names like Mitzi and Skip and to forget about hearts that look like valentines, this story provides funny instructions for writing a serious novel about love, while also giving us insight into the perpetually unsatisfied state of a truly creative mind. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. Forms of Devotion is a playful, sometimes surreal, and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places, and things. 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.

Each letter of the alphabet offers an entertaining piece of advice for life, including imperatives for everything from avoiding temptation to mastering useless skills and zealously embracing the pursuit of perfection. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. Forms of Devotion is a playful, sometimes surreal, and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places, and things. 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.

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.