Editions

Trilobites & Other Stories

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099583370

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 138g

  • RRP: £9.99

Trilobites & Other Stories

The stories in this collection nearly all take place in and around the mountain hollows of West Virginia: a world of cock-fighting, coal-mining, deer-stalking, sex, depression, drinking and death.

'It would be easy to allow his one collection of stories to be buried under the landslide of books published every year. But it’s worth doing a little excavating to dig it up. The past few years have seen late-in-the-day and posthumous revivals of interest in writers such ... John Williams. Get out your pickaxes'
New Yorker

Breece D’J Pancake left behind an astonishing achievement. He was a master of a distinctly American vernacular, which he used to remind us of all the ways that fiction could teach us about ourselves. These stories are absolutely essential reading - Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099583370

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 138g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • The best, most sincere writer I've ever read

    Kurt Vonnegut

  • Breece D’J Pancake left behind an astonishing achievement. He was a master of a distinctly American vernacular, which he used to remind us of all the ways that fiction could teach us about ourselves. These stories are absolutely essential reading

    Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

  • This is an exceptional voice; gritty, mordant, invested with the texture of stroked reality; urgent and haunting

    Margaret Atwood

  • Muscular, precise, lyric and unforgettable… Utterly singular

    Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  • Simple, rich with dialogue and precious

    Anna Fielding, Stylist

  • [Pancake’s] words…combined with an unsparing vision of humanity create the spine-tingling sense that you’re reading an original

    Max Liu, Independent

  • Haunting brilliance

    John Dugdale, Literary Review

  • By any standards, [the story “Trilobites”] is a masterpiece; that it is an artistic debut is astonishing… To say that Breece D’J Pancake is not well enough known is a massive understatement… Quite simply, a literary genius

    John Burnside, Guardian

  • Impressive

    Philip Maughan, New Statesman

About the Author

Breece Pancake

Breece D’J Pancake was born in in Charleston, West Virginia in 1952. His unusual middle name ‘D'J’ originated from a misprint of Pancake's middle initials by The Atlantic Monthly (D.J. for Dexter John) when Pancake's first published story, ‘Trilobites’ was published in 1977. Pancake decided not to correct it. In 1979, when he was just twenty-six, Pancake died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. He was buried in Milton, Virginia.

Breece Pancake

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