Although he wrote more than 30 books (fiction, nonfiction and poetry), we probably remember WP Kinsella best for Shoeless Joe, the book that inspired the ever-memorable 1989 Field of Dreams movie (starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones). His literary agent, Carolyn Swayze, reported, “W.P. (Bill) Kinsella has passed away at the age of 81.” Swayze further wrote: “He was a unique, creative and outrageously opinionated man.”
Most memorable are those infamous words: “If you build it, they will come.” Or, even: “Go the distance.” Made memorable by Field of Dreams, they also resonate into every other aspect of our lives.
The lyrical beauty and magic realism of the work (and movie) is captured with The New York Times review of Daniel Okrent: “Mr. Kinsella is drunk on complementary elixirs, literature and baseball, and the cocktail he mixes of the two is a lyrical, seductive and altogether winning concoction. It’s a love story, really the love his characters have for the game becoming manifest in the trips they make through time and space and ether.
The final, posthumous work of WP Kinsella, Russian Dolls, will be published in 2017 by Coteau Books