SOURCE: Murray, Don. “A Note on W. P. Kinsella's Humor.” International Fiction Review 14, no. 2 (1987): 98-9.

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

The Canadian author W. P. Kinsella has published two novels and over one hundred short stories, anecdotes, and brief “surreal” sketches (which he calls Brautigans after the late American humorist) since he first began to publish fiction in the mid-1970s.¹ Kinsella revitalizes old images and situations (the joy of playing together, the chill of isolation), blends romantic fantasy with baseball humor, and brings people out of the cold or off the Indian Reserve and into the pages of humorous books.

Humor is the basic ingredient in Kinsella's books. From the earliest collections of Indian stories, through the experimental forms of his non-Indian narratives and his celebrated first novel, Shoeless Joe (1982), to his most...