["The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake" offers twelve stories,] set in an impoverished region of West Virginia, by a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's, when the interrelated stories and prose pieces of "In Our Time" were published in 1924: this the good news. The tragic news is that this slender volume is all we will have of Breece D'J Pancake's work, since he committed suicide in 1979, when he was not quite 27 years old…. [The] stories—tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past's dominion over the present—argue for a sensibility so finely honed, so vulnerable to the inexorable passage of time, that it is likely death appeared as a solace. As the stories make powerfully clear, Breece Pancake identified so intensely with the coal-mining and farming area of West Virginia in which he was born that...