Re-reading "Shoeless Joe" nearly 30 years later

Got my copy the other day. Started reading it this morning.

 

JD, here's a link to that Kinsella story ... which is hilarious, by the way:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hniotyk62dez192/Kinsella_WP-How_I_Got_My_Nickname-fullstory.pdf

 

Thank you very much for doing that. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was fun to read it again and remember how much I laughed the first time.

 

I realized that the producers/writers of Field of Dreams could have used the first 20 pages of the book to form about 85% of the movie.

 

WP Kinsella was primarily a short story writer in the 70's and Oberon Press, a small Canadian literary outfit, published all his early work

Stories in his first collections were about the indigenous people of Alberta and one short story "Dance Me Outside" may have been his greatest.

In a later collection, he wrote a short story "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa"

A now unknown editor at Houghton Mifflin read the story and persuaded Kinsella to stretch it out to a novel. That was a mistake

Kinsella takes the essential plot in the story and turns it into a bloated mess

Sorry, not a fan of "Shoeless Joe" because the short story is almost perfect and the novel is a literary version of lipstick on a pig.

And the movie"Field of Dreams" is embarrassingly bad from almost any angle you can think of.

 

Well we'll disagree on that, but my child's hitting hot streak has continued and he even pitched a complete-game win in his first start of the season. There's magic in that book. Magic.