In the following essay, Aitken examines the various allusions to religion in Kinsella's writing.

In the following essay, Randall draws comparisons between the ways that Kinsella and authors Thomas Carlyle and J. R. R. Tolkien approach humor in their works.

In the following essay, Hamblin examines the elements of “magic realism” present in Kinsella's works.

In the following review, Murray evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the short stories in The Fencepost Chronicles.

In the following review, Wallach discusses the similarities and differences between The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and Morry Frank's Every Young Man's Dream.

When I learn that a book is populated by characters called Robert Coyote, Frank Fence-Post, Sadie One-Wound, and Poppy Twelvetrees, my response is usually a groan in anticipation of an attempt to make restitution for or to make me pay for Wounded Knee. Dee Brown's work seemed to call forth lost tribes of white men who discovered roots they never knew they had. The Great Spirit moved within them, and they felt, or at least suspected, a tickle of feathers down their backs. Kinsella's book Dance ...

In the following review, Murray asserts that humor is one of the dominant motifs in Kinsella's body of work.

[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-o...

In the following review, Kahn examines the plot structure and prose of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

In the following review, Native-American author Vizenor criticizes Kinsella's portrayals of Canadian Indians, stating that “humor is no excuse to exploit negative preconceptions about tribal people.”

W. P. Kinsella is not an Indian, a fact that would not be extraordinary were it not for the stories Kinsella writes about the Cree Silas Ermineskin; and his sister Illiana, who moved to the city and married a very straight white man; and his friend Frank Fencepost; and the medicine lady, Mad Etta, who wears dresses made from five flour sacks, with ermine tails fastened along the sleeves, and the rest of a Cree world. Kinsella's Indians are counterculture figures in the sense that their lives counter ...

In the following excerpt, Panofsky evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Winter Helen Dropped By.

In the following review, the critic praises Kinsella's storytelling abilities and provides several plot synopses of the stories in Red Wolf, Red Wolf.

In the following excerpt, Choice compliments Kinsella's prose in The Thrill of the Grass, noting that the collection is both surprising and engrossing.

In the following excerpt, Friis-Baastad praises the tales in Born Indian, noting that “these stories will move you as only the best products of the art of storytelling can.”

[Readers of Canadian literature] have had a plethora of guilt-ridden fiction written by white authors about Indians, and a little fiction written by Indians and Metis in which blame is laid on the whites with unconvincing stridency; the truth lies somewhere lost between them. W. P. Kinsella has found a way out of this impasse in a comic approach that restores proportion and brings an artistic authenticity to the portrayal of contemporary Indian life which we have encountered rarely in recent years. Indians ...

In the following review, the critic faults Magic Time for being overly sentimental, contrived, and a rehashing of similar themes and plots from Kinsella's previous novels.

In Born Indian, Kinsella creates the composite impression of a carnivorous, overtly hostile white society: "the daughter, who was named Dora, went off to Edmonton, got swallowed up by the city and it be just the same as if she died."… On one hand, the sheer absurdity of racial oppression becomes almost a liberating force: as one character says, "When we're down as low as we are on the totem pole then the only thing there is to do is laugh."… Balanced against ...

In the following review, the critic delivers a brief plot summary and contends that while not as strong as Kinsella's previous works, Magic Time still provides a satisfying ending, genuine characters, and an interesting look at baseball history.

[The stories in] Born Indian are cleverly written in a free-wheeling style…. This is Kinsella's third collection of funnysad tales about white-Indian confrontations, most of them narrated by Silas Ermineskin, a young Cree from a central Alberta reserve. It's cowboys and Indians in reverse, with the stupid, bigoted whites outfoxed, outjoked and outsexed by crafty salt-of-the-earth natives. Unquestionably, white racism deserves all this and more, but the crude articulation of stereotyped ...

W. P. Kinsella is a gifted Canadian writer who chooses rather oddly to present his stories through the persona of a Cree Indian, Silas Ermineskin. [In Scars, the] narrator's English is fractured in syntax but vivid in image and metaphor. Kinsella manages to provide a tragicomic perspective on the white and Indian worlds as they collide in a series of extravagant misunderstandings. The book gets off to a slow start, but the stories pick up with "John Cat," and the rest of the book is fin...

In the following review, Campbell offers a positive assessment of Red Wolf, Red Wolf.

Dance Me Outside is a vibrant and funny collection of stories…. Written in the first person in a lean style, they concern an eighteen year old Indian named Silas Ermineskin who lives on a reserve just south of Edmonton, Alberta. Silas is an impassive and resourceful kid, who, intent on his future, trains doggedly at a government technical school to be a mechanic. He shrugs off an ever-present prejudice that looms large as the distant Rocky Mountains. Traditionally, education is his only out, but Engl...