[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 as they are almost equally between the fantastic and the real. "Fiona the First"—accorded an Honourable Mention in Best American Short Stories 1980—is one of the fantasies. It deals with a sort of Ancient Mariner doomed for eighty years now to wander airports and railway stations picking up girls. The title story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," is another fantasy story, this one concerning a farmer who constructs a ballpark in his backyard in order to witness the return of the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson…. These are fanciful, entertaining stories.
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