The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake [Paperback]

Breece D'J Pancake (Author), James Alan McPherson (Author), John Casey (Author), Andre Dubus III (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Breece D'J Pancake was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316715972
• ISBN-13: 978-0316715973
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.5 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Twelve Outstanding Stories of West Virginia November 6, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The way words were meant to hold together September 6, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Stories from only Five Miles Away April 22, 2000

By Jason E. Wandling

Format:Paperback

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.