The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

by W. P. Kinsella

Overview

Bearing W.P. Kinsella's trademark combination of "sweet-natured prose and a richly imagined world" (Philadelphia Inquirer), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy tells the story of Gideon Clark, a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world that the indomitable Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against an amateur league, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. But a simple game somehow turned into a titanic battle of more than two thousand innings, and Gideon Clark struggles to set the record straight on this infamous game that no one else believes ever happened.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618340804
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/14/2003
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	444,619
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

W. P. Kinsella (1935–2016) was the author of numerous works of fiction, including the best-selling Shoeless Joe, for which he won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and eleven highly acclaimed short story collections.

Date of Birth:

May 25, 1935

Date of Death:

September 16, 2016

Place of Birth:

Edmonton, Alberta

Education:

University of Victoria

Website:

http://wpkinsella.com

Editorial Reviews

On the day he met his true love, a carnival performer named Darling Maudie, Matthew Clarke was literally struck by lightning and magically imbued with the knowledge that in 1908 the Chicago Cubs had traveled to Onamata, Iowa, to play a seemingly endless game against an all-star amateur team, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. He spends the rest of his life trying to prove this fact to the worldeven writing a dissertation on itbut no one else remembers the Confederacy or the game. When Matthew commits an imaginative suicide (by allowing himself to be hit by a stray line drive), his son Gideon, the hero of this tale, inherits his father's obsession. With the help of an old family friend who has a glimmer of memory of the game, Gideon and a friend, Stan, travel back through time to 1908, to witness the event and to learn about the mysterious forces that caused a memory lapse in those who witnessed it. In his first novel since Shoeless Joe, Kinsella returns to the magical turf he created there: a loving mixture of baseball, life and fantasy, in a world where dreams don't have to come true, because they have a validity all their own. (April 7)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Much more than a baseball book . . . The Iowa Baseball Confederacy captures Kinsella's love of baseball, his appreciation for its infinite dreams, and its glorious possibilities."

The Seattle Times —

From the Publisher