SOURCE: Kadohata, Cynthia. “Breece D'J Pancake.” Mississippi Review 18, no. 1 (1989): 35-61.

In the following essay, Kadohata offers a biographical and critical profile of Pancake.

A few years ago, when I first read Breece D'J Pancake's stories, I knew I had to know more about him. The Atlantic Monthly Press published his collection of stories in 1983, four years after he killed himself at age twenty-six. The collection, tense and paradoxical with startling descriptions, is written as if Pancake were possessed by his home state of West Virginia the way you can be possessed by another person. The paradox is here: these are stories about the power of redemption that are also about the power of sin, stories about estrangement and empathy, stories about disorder in which everything seems to happen for a reason, stories about leaving that are also—always—about staying.

I went to search for Pancake this year...