SOURCE: Vigderman, Patricia. “K-Marts and Failing Farms.” The Nation 236, no. 11 (19 March 1983): 345-47.

In the following excerpt, Vigderman favorably compares Pancake's short stories to Bobbie Mason's Shiloh and Other Stories, asserting that Pancake's fiction “offers the deep pleasure of art created out of the need to transform suffering.”

It's all the more exciting, therefore, to turn to The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, for here is fiction that offers the deep pleasure of art created out of the need to transform suffering. Four years ago, before he was quite 27, Pancake killed himself. These twelve stories are all we will ever have from him, but they may well be read for generations to come.

While [Bobbie] Mason's characters are sociological types, Pancake's are individuals who act out of the kinds of necessity present in our own lives. We are not tourists in his fiction, but residents. Pancake's characters, like Mason's...