From the author of Shoeless Joe—the basis for the film Field of Dreams—come baseball stories that define “a world in which magic and reality combine” (The New York Times).   Shortstops who run with the wolves, painted eggs that reveal deeply disturbing meanings, long-dead Hall of Famers who miraculously return to the game, an Iowa minor-league town with a secret conspiracy: these are the elements from which W. P. Kinsella weaves nine fabulous stories about the magical world of baseball.   From the dugouts, clubhouses, bedrooms, and barrooms to the interior worlds of hope and despair, these eerie stories present the absurdities of human relationships and reveal the writer’s special genius for touching the heart.   “His short stories about baseball are wistful things of beauty which serve to remind us how the game should feel—the innate glory of a diamond...

Narrated by young Jamie O’Day, who is beginning to understand that, like his daddy says, “every story is about sex or death, or sometimes both”, The Winter Helen Dropped By is a story of growing up, of loss, of laughter and of characters both sexy and dead. Helen is the young, pregnant Indian woman who drops into Jamie’s life one freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey snow-storming night. It is her haunting presence, woven throughout Jamie’s accounts of the spring he damn near drowned, the summer of the peculiar reconstituted wedding of Mrs.Beatrice Ann Stevenson and Mr.Earl J. Rasmussen, followed by the summer White Chaps murdered his wife, that makes this a funny, sad and wholly wonderful novel.

From the author of Shoeless Joe—the basis for the film Field of Dreams—come baseball stories that capture the magic and wonder of the game.   No one can write about baseball with the same brilliant combination of mysticism and realism as W. P. Kinsella. Lovers of the game and lovers of fine writing will thrill at the range and depth of the eleven stories that make up this collection.   From the magical conspiracy of the title story, to the celestial prediction in “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon,” to the desolation of “The Baseball Spur,” Kinsella explores the world of baseball and makes it, miraculously, a microcosm of the human condition.  Praise for W. P. Kinsella’s The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories “[Kinsella] defines a world in which magic and reality combine to make us laugh and think about the perceptions...

“A memorable addition to the literature about the summer’s game” from the author of Shoeless Joe—the basis for the film Field of Dreams (Detroit Free Press).   Bearing W. P. Kinsella’s trademark combination of “sweet-natured prose and a richly imagined world,” The Iowa Baseball Confederacy tells the story of Gideon Clark, a man on a quest (The Philadelphia Inquirer). He is out to prove to the world that the indomitable Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against an amateur league, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. But a simple game somehow turned into a titanic battle of more than two thousand innings, and Gideon Clark struggles to set the record straight on this infamous game that no one else believes ever happened.   “A riveting mystery with a host of fascinating characters, a first-rate ghost...

An entertaining romp about love, loss, crime, and baseball, from the bestselling author of Shoeless Joe. Washed-up pitcher Joe McCoy, in a strange twist of fate, has wound up as a fugitive running from the FBI. Without many other options, Joe goes home to Iowa to try to seek out the only two men who just might be able to help him—Ray Kinsella and Gideon Clarke... "Continuing his series of bestselling baseball sagas...W.P. Kinsella brings nomadic pitcher Joe McCoy to the role of protagonist. Romping from bed to bed, he flops through a career of eight wins and 23 losses, tries journalism without much success, kidnaps a diplomat's baby, helps stick up a burger joint, and comes to terms with his life as his teenage sweetheart lies dying in hospital...a good read...What makes the book complex and more than just a comedy is time shifting as Kinsella goes from present to past and on to dreams of what might have been. The technique gives the story...

A "warmhearted" small-town novel, full of "endearing characters and baseball lore," by the author of Shoeless Joe (Publishers Weekly). Mike Houle is a college all-star second baseman in his junior year when he turns down a fourth-round draft pick offer from the Montreal Expos. He'll finish his business degree and try his luck again next year. But Mike's final year in college sees his performance take a downward slide, and his big league dreams are going the way of his stats. When Mike's agent offers him a chance to play in the Cornbelt League in Iowa, Mike can't refuse. He can even handle the isolation of living in Grand Mound once he learns he's a cinch to start at second base. Sure enough, Mike's never played better than on the Grand Mound Greenshirts, and he even begins to fall for the town's charms—including a certain Tracy Ellen Powell. That is, until he starts to suspect that when the good citizens of Grand...

Ray Kinsella is sitting quietly on the back porch of his Iowa farm one evening when he hears the ghostly voice of a baseball announcer who says to him, "If you build it, he will come." Needing no further explanation, Kinsella immediately sees in his mind's eye a baseball field that he is being asked to create in the middle of a corn field. The voice will speak only two other things to Ray: "Ease his pain" and "Go the distance," and yet the dreaming, idealistic man knows just what he is supposed to do. He knows that digging up the corn field in the back of his house will inspire the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. So opens the award-winning novel by W.P. Kinsella which was the inspiration for the incredibly popular film Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner.W.P. Kinsella has been called a great writer of baseball novels but this title transcends that description. Kinsella doesn't...

Butterfly Winter, W.P. Kinsella's first novel in 15 years, is the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins born in the Caribbean country of Courteguay, a lush and enchanted but impoverished enclave on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where time moves at its own pace and reality is open to question. The brothers are destined to play ball in America, and to shape the history of their baseball-crazed homeland. They mature quickly and by the age of ten they leave home for the Major Leagues. Julio is a winning pitcher who, much to the chagrin of any team that signs him, will only throw to his catcher brother, who is a very weak hitter. As they pursue their baseball dreams, events in their homeland, including political brutalities and the outlawing of baseball, continue to shape their lives. They are monitored by the Wizard, a mysterious figure who controls events behind the scenes. In his last years, the Wizard tells the story of the twins, their family...

This career retrospective celebrates the 80th birthday of baseball's greatest scribe, W. P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe), as well as the 25th anniversary of Field of Dreams, the film that he inspired.In addition to his classic baseball tales, W. P. Kinsella is also a critically-acclaimed short fiction writer. His satiric wit has been celebrated with numerous honors, including the Order of British Columbia.Here are his notorious First Nation narratives of indigenous Canadians, and a literary homage to J. D. Salinger. Alongside the "real" story of the 1951 Giants and the afterlife of Roberto Clemente, are the legends of a pirated radio station and a hockey game rigged by tribal magic.Eclectic, dark, and comedic by turns, The Essential W. P. Kinsella is a living tribute to an extraordinary raconteur.