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 achieve the impossible.” I like to keep attempting the impossible. I like to do audacious things. I like to weave fact and fantasy. I like to alter history.

Kinsella is at his best when he lets the fantasy overtake the facts. In “The Last Pennant before Armageddon,” for example, Chicago Cubs manager Al Tiller has been informed from on high that his team will finally win a pennant but that when it wins (according to some inexplicable holy design) it will signal the end of the world by nuclear war. For Tiller, it's a conflict of interests. For the reader, this unlikely plot works like pure magic.

TV baseball always bores me stiff, yet here's this West Coast Canadian writer, former Edmontonian, ex-life insurance salesman, and retired pizza parlour manager successfully selling me his personal euphoria over baseball. Even in the title story, I genuinely care about the absurd conspiracy to plant patches of real grass, tuft by tuft, back into a big-time ball-park, replacing the synthetic turf and thereby making a stand against the creeping artificiality in contemporary life.

Behind the ecstasy and the magic, however, lies an undercurrent of sadness whenever the real world takes a big enough chunk out of “the game.” “The Baseball Spur,” “Barefoot and Pregnant in Des Moines,” and “Nursie” exhibit the melancholy of professional (public) players trying to live out private lives with minimal success. “Driving toward the Moon,” the only story actually set in Canada, does a masterful job of conveying the angst of a rookie leaguer willing to sacrifice the game for a woman he falls in love with. These are the sort of trade-offs Kinsella worries about when he keeps his fiction down to earth.

Kinsella's baseball world is populated by few genuine winners, and he makes little use of any Howard Cosell play-by-play narrative. He admits in his introduction that stories about athletic heroics bore him. “Ultimately, a fiction writer can be anything except boring,” he states, and since The Thrill of the Grass packs many surprises, it is freighted with no boredom.