Brother Frank's Gospel Hour - Tapa dura

These eleven stories continue the adventures of Silas Ermineskin and his sidekick Frank Fencepost, as Kinsella returns to the Cree Indian reserve in Hobbema, Alberta, where his cast of zany characters, last seen in "The Fencepost Chronicles" and "The Miss Hobbema Pageant," is at its wry best. Here Frank Fencepost, true to form as a fast-talking con artist, outwits the Alberta Supreme Court in a hilarious cattle-insemination case in "Bull." In the title story he becomes an evangelizing Robin Hood, turning the government-sponsored K-U-G-H radio show into a scheme to use listeners' donations to fund listeners' wishes (and incidentally line his pockets), and in "Miracle on Manitoba Street" he visits a Montana reserve where he carves a picture of the Virgin Mary on a derelict Frigidaire and convinces the local medicine woman it's a miracleone worthy of an admission charge. Not all the stories are humorous: "Dream Catcher" grapples with sexual violence when Silas's twelve-year-old sister is assaulted and Mad Etta, the community's four-hundred-pound medicine woman, provides a nightmare "cure" for the would-be rapist; "Ice Man" depicts gender discrimination, as Jason Twelve Trees fights to participate in a cooking competition despite his father's wish for him to become a mechanic; and "The Rain Birds" shows the consequences of the government's computer-driven corporate farms riding roughshod over the human and natural environment in western Canada."

W. P. KINSELLA is the author of several short story collections, including three reissued by SMU Press: "Red Wolf, Red Wolf" (1990), "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" (1993), and "Go the Distance: Baseball Stories" (1995), originally published as "The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt." He is best known for his award-winning novel "Shoeless Joe," which became the film "Field of Dreams" in 1989. A native Canadian, Kinsella divides his time between western Canada and California.