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Summary: Breece Pancake's stories will both warm and break your heart
Review: Anyone who trips across this book must feel lucky. It is heart-warming in it's humanity and heart-breaking in it's honesty. Regardless of where you are in the world you will find something in this book. Sometimes gifted people that die young are great in that they hint at greatness. Breece Pancake hit the bullseye first. Sadly he did not have the saving of himself. The Gram Parsons of literature.
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Summary: An unknown master of the short story
Review: Breece Pancake is the best short story writer that you've never heard of. His tales of modern West Virginia life are good the way Hemingway's work is good, or Raymond Carver's. Pancake has things to say and he says them with authority, style and grace. This is an outstanding collection.
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Summary: Twelve Outstanding Stories of West Virginia
Review: Breece Pancake killed himself with a shotgun in Charlottesville, Virginia on Palm Sunday in 1979. He was 26 years old at the time and had just completed a graduate writing program at the University of Virginia. Four years later "The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake" was published, a collection of twelve stories that posthumously established his literary reputation as one of the finest short story writers in twentieth century American literature.Pancake grew up in the hollows of West Virginia and each of the carefully wrought stories in this collection deals with the seemingly desperate lives of the working poor in that part of the country. They are remarkably crafted stories, written with a deep sense for the locale and the people from which they are drawn. They are also models of precision, the kind of stories that deserve to be read over and over, studied for the way in which they use foregrounding and the mundane details of everyday life--albeit everyday life that quietly screams with the desperation of poverty, deadening work, drinking, promiscuity, and brutality-to draw complex portraits of people who endure, even when endurance is no more than a substitute for hope. As he writes in "A Room Forever," the story of a tugboat mate spending New Year's Eve in an eight-dollar-a-night hotel room where he drinks cheap whiskey out of the bottle and eventually ends up with a teen-aged prostitute: "I stop in front of a bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it. It's always there." The best of these stories are "Trilobites," "The Honored Dead," "Fox Hunters," and "In the Dry." But there really isn't a weak story in the bunch. Every story is captivating, every one an exemplar of what good short story writing should be. At the end, the only thing that disappoints, that leaves the reader discomforted, is the thought that Pancake died so young, that these are the only stories we have by a truly remarkable writer.
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Summary: Brilliant Stories from only Five Miles Away
Review: Having been raised only five or so miles away from the town Pancake grew up in, I was a little bit more than amazed that I'd never heard of him. Adding to my amazement, I was an English Lit major going to college in West Virginia. Pancake's insights are almost horrifyingly close to the truth. His "Faulknerian" insight (as many have phrased it) is so much more powerful because it honestly conveys the spirit of southern W.Va. Powerful stories, especially valuable to anyone raised in Appalachian America.
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Summary: Brilliant Stories from only Five Miles Away
Review: Having been raised only five or so miles away from the town Pancake grew up in, I was a little bit more than amazed that I'd never heard of him. Adding to my amazement, I was an English Lit major going to college in West Virginia. Pancake's insights are almost horrifyingly close to the truth. His "Faulknerian" insight (as many have phrased it) is so much more powerful because it honestly conveys the spirit of southern W.Va. Powerful stories, especially valuable to anyone raised in Appalachian America.
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Summary: A collection to read, enjoy, and then return to
Review: I first read this book in 1988, but I have returned to it many times since, to reflect on the beauty of the prose and the land it describes.
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Summary: A Voice Crying to be Heard...
Review: In this volume, the writer's surviving voice really hits home and stays there. Like that perfect song that stays in your head and carries you through the day, Breece Pancake's words and wisdom echoe through the reader's mind forever after reading them. In this life, there is always something around to remind of a Breece Pancake story. From the time weathered fossils in the creek beds to the rare West Virginia 120 m.p.h. strait stretches, after reading this volume I see Pancake everywhere, no matter where I am in the world. Like the trilobite preserved beneath the earth that hides it, these stories are a tangible (and for some reason widely unknown), history of a time and generation that, like the tragedy of Pancake's suicide, is destined to be repeated if ignored.
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Summary: The way words were meant to hold together
Review: There are times when things come together in such a way that you know it's perfect. It can be a phrase of music, a blending of colors and sounds in film, or, in this case, the words of a story. This book tells stories that fall together in a timeless way, but are still firmly rooted in a specific place and time. Having grown up in West Virginia, there were parts of these stories that spoke to me from a sort of "native" perspective. But more to it was the emotion that was the core, the skin and the stitching of each of these stories. It's a good book to own. To read from when you feel like being taken to another place for a while. And to carry a piece of that place with you once you put the book down.
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Summary: Breece Pancake's stories will both warm and break your heart
Review: This is an utterly sterling collection of short fiction set in Appalachian by a writer who truly knew the people, their language, and their land. Though setting thoroughly permeates these stories, they will be treasured by anyone who appreciates characters so real you know what they look like, how they walk and sound... Pancake (his real name) died in '79, I think, four years before this collection was published. American literature is immensely poorer for having lost him... Buy the book. It ain't expensive and you won't be sorry.
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Summary: Wonderful --and knowledgeable-- Appalachian short fiction
Review: This is an utterly sterling collection of short fiction set in Appalachian by a writer who truly knew the people, their language, and their land. Though setting thoroughly permeates these stories, they will be treasured by anyone who appreciates characters so real you know what they look like, how they walk and sound... Pancake (his real name) died in '79, I think, four years before this collection was published. American literature is immensely poorer for having lost him... Buy the book. It ain't expensive and you won't be sorry.
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