FICTION

SHOELESS JOE JACKSON COMES TO IOWA: Stories by W.P. Kinsella (Southern Methodist University Press: $19.95; 141 pp.). It’s odd that this collection hasn’t previously been published in the U.S. (it was first released in Canada in 1980) because it contains one absolutely flawless story, two fine ones and a few merely good ones. The wonderful title story, which became the novel “Shoeless Joe” and then the movie “Field of Dreams,” shows that W. P. Kinsella doesn’t need all that space and color to create a heartbreakingly perfect world: It’s magic, the way he paints the loving farm wife, the fan with a fantasy and Shoeless Joe materializing in an immaculate left field--”parrot-green, cool as mint, soft as moss, lying there like a cashmere blanket”--in a mere 16 pages. “Mankiewitz Won’t Be Bowling Tuesday Nights Anymore” is more routine but also more poignant, chronicling the retirement and death of a cab driver in a corporatized taxi world; “Grecian Urn” is bolder, involving a couple’s daring journey into the decoration encircling Keats’ fabled vessel. “Waiting for the Call” and “First Names and Empty Pockets” are also good. Don’t be put off by “Fiona the First,” for some reason the first story in this volume; it’s the only one in which Kinsella’s melding of the ordinary and the fantastic fails to gel.