Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

A collection of short stories from “a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review).

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a remarkably promising career when he took his own life in 1979 at the age twenty-six. In 1983 the posthumous publication of this book—a collection of stories that depict, with astonishing power and grace, the world of Pancake’s native rural West Virginia—electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across decades.

“Breece D'J Pancake's is an exceptional voice: gritty, mordant, invested with the texture of stroked reality; urgent, and haunting.” —Margaret Atwood

“Stunning . . . powerful and astonishing . . . Brilliance is on these pages.” —Karen Heller, USA Today

“Breece Pancake’s stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners.” —Jayne Anne Phillips

“Pancake’s knowledge of his domain resembles in its totality Faulkner’s exhaustive knowledge of Yoknapatawpha County . . . The bleak poignant outer and inner landscapes of these stories are both a requiem for Pancake and a grace to the reader.” —Harold Jaffe, Newsday

“Powerful, elegiac . . . Mr. Pancake has a sharp, writerly eye for detail, and he uses those details to build a picture, layer by layer, of life in the barren hills and hollows of his native West Virginia.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

© 2025 Little, Brown and Company (Ebook): 9780316252324

Release date

Ebook: 8 April 2025