PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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's stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners. We find here a landscape preserved in rich sadness because it is forgotten, a people whose lives are informed by loss, wrenching cruelty, and the luminous dignity which marks the endurance of all that is most humane -- Jayne Anne Phillips So thoroughly does he know and sympathize with the people of his doomed region that one comes away immersed in their disparate yet tragically kindred fates - and rather depressed by the unalterable fact that a uniquely gifted young writer's canon is, with his first book, complete -- Joyce Carol Oates New York Times
