The reviews of The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake have been uniformly reverent: look, we have been told, what a gift shone briefly in our midst. Robert Towers wrote an attentive, generously inclined piece in The New York Review of Books and Joyce Carol Oates went even further in a front-page rave in The New York Times Book Review [see excerpts above]. She found Pancake to be "a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's…." Pancake's reputation, it should be noted, preceeded him; I (and I assume others) had heard mention of his name—it wasn't, obviously, one I was likely to forget—from several magazine and book editors some time before I ever set eyes on this collection: I was prepared to pay attention. Well, I have read the stories and I, at least, found that they don't...