[The ten short stories in Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa] mark a considerable change in direction for W. P. Kinsella whose first two collections, Dance Me Outside and Scars, deal with life in and around a Cree Indian reservation. The stories here, most of them successful, are set in such widely differing places as Disneyland; an Iowa cornfield (more than one Iowa cornfield actually); Maintoba Street in Victoria, known as "The Pit," Kinsella says; a whorehouse in Edmonton, "jumping-off place for American troops going and coming on the Alaska Highway"; and a forlorn San Francisco bar, looking "as if it had endured a century of continuous Monday nights" where the protagonist in the story "Last Names and Empty Pockets" drinks with Janis Joplin.

In addition to these rich and varied land-and-cityscapes (the people inhabiting them are just as diverse), Kinsella's stories constantly change mood and tone, divided...