Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa: Stories

Set in Iowa, urban Canada, and San Francisco, the stories in WP Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa stem from ordinary experiences made “un-ordinary”.

Almost equally divided between the real and the fantastic, these ten stories showcase Kinsella’s use of precise detail, on-the-mark dialect, and shape-shifting variations on the theme of how to survive in the world.

In Fiona the First, a hungover aluminium window salesman is a kind of Ancient Mariner doomed to wander Pony Express depot’s, railway stations, and airports picking up girls. In the title story that grew into the novel Shoeless Joe and later became the acclaimed film Field of Dreams, baseball, magic, and the redemptive power of fantasy converge in a Midwest cornfield. In a Picture of the Virgin, a clever prostitute cons a gullible young man in an Edmonton brothel, and in First Names and Empty Pockets, an Iowa mender of broken dolls drinks with a brash young Janis Joplin in a forlorn San Francisco bar.