Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

By: Andre Dubus III, Breece D'J Pancake

Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur

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.

Short career, like a meteor

A very beautiful and transporting writer, in which I can personally see some influence of Kerouac and Salinger, rather than the Hemingway described by Joyce Carol Oates. What a shame his life was ended so early, a shame for him, and a shame for us. The characters in Pancake's stories here remind me of the thin elongated people created by the sculptor, Giacometti. He once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast" and this is exactly how I see Pancake's literary population. These sad filthy people are not the whole of them, just the image that we are left with when they disappear, almost like shadows burnt into a wall in a nuclear blast. The things that truly add color to these stories, and they absolutely fill them, are all of the normally unspoken-about birds, and foxes, and snakes, and owls, and wasps, and crawly things that surround us and add an essential stability to these otherwise futile lives.

The narration was fine, though having previously read the print version a few times, the changes in voice and accents is often at odds with what I prefer to "hear" in my own voice.

Includes a wonderful Introduction and two worthwhile Afterwords in getting to know the personality of the author.