Forms of Devotion: Stories and Pictures - Hardcover

Schoemperlen, Diane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002245663 ISBN 13: 9780002245661

Publisher: Harpercollins Canada, 1998

Synopsis

Diane Schoemperlen's acclaimed In the Language of Love expanded our expectations of the contemporary novel, using everyday words to deconstruct a young woman's life and loves. In her new short story collection,Forms of Devotion, she again tests the bounds of her craft, creating an arresting and wonderfully readable work that is also a treat for the eye.

Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. The illustrations, selected by Schoemperlen and depicting almost every subject imaginable, are wood engravings and line drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some cases, she was inspired to write the story after studying the illustrations; in other cases, she wrote the story first, then chose or constructed the pictures to accompany it. The result 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.

Each story is a creative delight, perfectly formed and rich in mischievous wit, irony and multi-layered meaning. The title story, “Forms of Devotion,” is a wonderful literary cataloguing of the traits and qualities of the faithful, those who “sail off to work, perfect confident that they will indeed get there: on time, intact. It does not occur to them that they could just as well be broadsided by a Coca-Cola delivery truck running the red light at the corner of Johnson and Main.” “Five Small Rooms” is an intriguing, spectral journey into the narrator's imagination, with the reader left wondering, “Is it madness or a murder mystery?” In “How Deep is the River,” the author offers an innovative, completely compelling take on the ubiquitous high school math problem that begins “Train A and Train B are traveling toward the same bridge from opposite directions...”

Quite different in form, yet alike in their ability to entertain and provoke, the stories inForms of Devotion show once again that Diane Schoemperlen's voice is as intriguing, fresh and electric as ever.

About this title

Review:

Cuttingly witty, almost obsessively precise, they seem to be about ordinary circumstances, but lead inexorably to startling conclusions -- Booklist

Filled with wry humour . . . an incredible ability to capture both the mundane and the erotically charged -- Toronto Globe and Mail

Schoemperlen's inventive language and narrative structures encourage readers to be free 'from the prison of everyday thinking' -- New York Times Book Review

Witty, wicked mock pieces of social commentary -- Kirkus Reviews

From the Author:

Award Winner
"Forms of Devotion" is the winner of the 1998 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, Canada's most prestigious literary prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins Canada
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002245663
• ISBN 13: 9780002245661
• Binding: Hardcover