[The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake] is a satisfying volume, the world Breece Pancake created sandwiched by evocations of the creator himself. For many readers, these pages will be varnished with sadness for the writer who might have been; for me, the varnish is perhaps a shade darker, because I knew Breece slightly for the last four years of his life. How slightly I never realized until I picked up the bound galleys for this book.

We studied and taught together at the University of Virginia, where the master for young fiction writers was, and is, the short-story writer Peter Taylor. The most important thing Taylor had to teach, both through his work and his conversation, was that a writer must, to be more than a journeyman, have a subject—that is, a world all his own, a world he knows better than anyone else, knows so well...