Overview: Editorial Review

Breece D'j Pancake, after a short and immersely promising career during which he published several stories of astonishing power, took his own life near Charlottesville, Virginia, before his twenty-seventh birthday. The stories in this volume nearly all take place in and around the mountain hollows of Est Virginia and tell of fox hunting, cockfighting, coal mining, prizefighting, deer stalking, truck driving, stock shows, sex, depression, drinking, and death. Twelve in all, half never before published, the stories are the work of an uncannily odservant chronicler of his region, who evokes a whole crowd of doomed and despairing brawlers, murderers, drunkards, and demented husbands and wives--desperate people desperately alive. The Stories of Breece D'j Pancake is the summation of a writer of rare talent, whose flame, though brief,burned fiercely.