assorted short stories by the author of Shoeless Joe who is also a fan of Flannery O'Connor - I liked some a lot, and others meant nothing to me and were promptly forgotten (you'd probably like some and not like others, but perhaps the roster would line up entirely differently :) ( )

I always say I don't really care for short stories but then I run across a master in the art of short fiction, like Alice Munro, and I say that they are so good they are the exception to my general rule. Now I am going to have to add W. P. Kinsella to that list. Each one of the stories in this collection was a gem.

The title story is a tribute to Flannery O'Connor. In his foreword Kinsella calls O'Connor "probably the best short fiction writer the United States has ever produced." I have never read anything by O'Connor but after that praise I can tell I am going to have to do so. The title comes from the disease that O'Connor suffered from most of her life, lupus. Lupus is a disease with a myriad of symptoms but one of them is that people get red splotches on their skin hence the red in the title. Lupus means wolf in Latin;ergo the wolf.

The last story also has a reference to O'Connor. In the foreword Kinsella says that "Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck" is his favourite in the collection and I can see that. It is one of the few stories that is actually set in Canada so it seems a little more real than the others.

Of course, Kinsella is known as a baseball writer and there are some baseball references in some of the stories. In "Billy in Trinidad" Billy the Kid takes part in a baseball game in Trinidad, Colorado. I found a picture online of Billy playing croquet but I couldn't find anything about him playing baseball. Maybe it is just another example of Kinsella imagining an interesting baseball scenario.

Really well written stories from a master that I haven't explored for a long time. Glad I did. ( )