SOURCE: Choyce, Lesley. “Three Hits and a Miss.” Books in Canada 13 (November 1984): 23.

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

W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe performed one of the rarest accomplishments in my reading history: it successfully sucked me into one man's private modern vision of ecstasy, and that vision wrapped itself like soft calf leather around the sport of baseball. The Thrill of the Grass promised to do it all over again, this time with 11 short stories, each knitting a revised vision of the universe as potential but never fully realized no-hitter.

Penguin wisely allowed three of these four writers to provide their own introductions (S. J. Duncan not being around for the revival of her work), and Kinsella's pitch is this:

Someone once said, “Those who never attempt the absurd never...