A definitive edition of the haunted and haunting stories of the
legendary West Virginia writer, with rare unfinished stories and
fragments and revealing letters
Breece D'J Pancake published only a handful of stories before he took
his own life in 1979, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Those
stories and a small number of others found among his papers after his
death comprise the remarkable posthumous collection The Stories of
Breece D'J Pancake (1983), recognized at the time as an American
Dubliners (Jayne Anne Phillips) and a collection by a young writer of
such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to
Hemingway's (Joyce Carol Oates). Kurt Vonnegut called him merely the
best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. Today his diverse
admirers include Margaret Atwood, Andre Dubus III, Tom Waits, and Lorde.
The Collected Breece D'J Pancake brings together the original landmark
book, several story drafts and fragments, and a selection of Pancake's
letters to offer an unprecedented picture of his life and art. Among the
unfinished stories are fragments from Pancake's two planned novels. The
letters document his relationship with writers such as Peter Taylor,
John Casey, James Alan McPherson, and Mary Lee Settle, and offer a
picture of his collaborative relationship with his mother, who sent him
newspaper clippings and helped him research his stories.
Pancake's stories are the only stories written in just this way, Jayne
Anne Phillips writes in her introduction, from inside the minds of
protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world
closed to others. At once beautiful and relentlessly bleak, the stories
concern miners, truckers, farmers, waitresses, and others facing
constricted economic and life prospects. In one way or another, his
characters are stuck, hoping for a change in fortune they can neither
relinquish nor quite bring themselves to believe in, the land and the
past making equally strong claims on their darkening present.
