The Essential W. P. Kinsella

Starred review from February 16, 2015
The career of the incomparable Kinsella (Shoeless Joe) is beautifully represented by these 31 short stories, including, of course, “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa,” the haunting tale of a baseball fan’s obsession with a long-dead star that was developed into a bestselling novel and then the film Field of Dreams. Other charming baseball fantasies include “The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record,” in which a fan agrees to sacrifice himself to bring back the recently dead Yankees star Thurman Munson, and “Searching for January,” which concerns an encounter with the deceased Roberto Clemente. Alongside these stories are several more realistic and mostly gentle satires, such as “The Fog,” that present the escapades of several indefatigable members of Canada’s First Nations. “The Grecian Urn” concerns a couple who can inhabit the interior worlds of great works of art. “K Mart” is the touching tale of three boys who use baseball to escape from their unhappy lives. Kinsella is a masterly writer of short fiction. Though his first-person narrators, mostly men much like himself, can become a bit repetitive when the collection is read straight through, each of these works, whether fantastic or realistic, is individually a small marvel of the storyteller’s art.

March 15, 2015
The collected short fiction of the Canadian author of Shoeless Joe (1982), the novel that was made into the film Field of Dreams, includes what Kinsella is best known forbaseball stories (including Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, the novel's embryo)but there are also tales of the Hobbema Indian (Cree) reservation in Alberta and delightfully more, all having appeared over the years in periodicals and previous collections. These stories, a mixed bag in terms of quality, style, and content, contain several memorable pieces. Some contain a sharp satiric edge and a gentle sense of humor, and a few feature Kinsella's unique combination of the real and the imagined. In How I Got My Nickname, the young narrator improbably contributes to the New York Giants' legendary 1951 chase to the pennant (cameos by Leo Durocher and Willie Mays); in First Names and Empty Pockets, the narrator (a different one) even more improbably talks about his long marriage to Janis Joplin. This book's publication should bring readers back to the once very popular Kinsella, now 79, and one hopes it attracts new readers as well.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)