Description

Ron Rash, Daniel Woodrell and Chris Offutt – to name just a few – have introduced discerning readers to the hardscrapple lives of America’s heartland, away from the coasts, the freeways and the big cities. But before them came Breece D’J Pancake, a powerful and poetic writer for whom the term “Dirty Realism” could have been coined. Pancake has only one book of stories to his name, published posthumously after his death at his own hand in 1979 while still in his twenties, and has been championed by fellow writers but generally ignored by the public. Vintage’s republication of “Trilobites and other stories” should change that. Pancake’s characters – mostly drawn from the coal-mining community of West Virginia in which he grew up – do not enjoy happy endings. But they are vividly brought to life – even if their circumstances and prospects are as bleak as any in the books of Cormac McCarthy