Box Socials

With the award-winning, bestselling, universally acclaimed Shoeless Joe (the basis for the movie "Field of Dreams"), W.P. Kinsella established himself as a storyteller of unsurpassed wit and an unforgettably whimsical voice. But Kinsella's new novel, Box Socials, is easily the best book of his career. Set in the small towns, ball fields, barns and bedrooms of Alberta, Canada, and populated by some of the quirkiest, rowdiest, hottest-blooded folks in fiction, Box Socials paints a brilliantly comic, full-color portrait of North American life in the 1940s. Here's the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock, a small-town greaser whose claim to fame was hitting a baseball clean across the Pembina River, almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals - but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller of Cleveland Indian fame in Renfrew Park, Edmonton, Alberta. Along the way to Al's moment of truth at the plate, we learn about the bizarre, touchingly hilarious lives and loves of just about anyone who ever passed through New Oslo, Fark, or Venusberg. Narrator Jamie O'Day, the young wide-eyed offspring of downwardly mobile hillbillies, plunks us down in the middle of the wild six-day Ukrainian wedding of Lavonia Lakustra and her Little American Soldier. He introduces us to the luscious Velvet Bozniak, who knows more about sex than any girl has a right to and who is determined to share all her wisdom with Jamie. And of course he attends a slew of box socials, whist drives, and community dances, where the women gossip and flirt while the men tank up on Heathen's Rapture and haul off to engage in the only sport they know aside from baseball - fistfights. Full of the crackle of down-home folktales, by turns randy, riveting and heart-breaking, Box Socials is the triumph of Kinsella's career.