Trilobites & Other Stories: Breece Pancake - Softcover

"The best, most sincere writer I've ever read" (Kurt Vonnegut)

"Breece D’J Pancake left behind an astonishing achievement. He was a master of a distinctly American vernacular, which he used to remind us of all the ways that fiction could teach us about ourselves. These stories are absolutely essential reading" (Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds)

"This is an exceptional voice; gritty, mordant, invested with the texture of stroked reality; urgent and haunting" (Margaret Atwood)

"Muscular, precise, lyric and unforgettable... Utterly singular" (Eileen Battersby Irish Times)

"Simple, rich with dialogue and precious" (Anna Fielding Stylist)

"[Pancake’s] words...combined with an unsparing vision of humanity create the spine-tingling sense that you’re reading an original" (Max Liu Independent)

"Haunting brilliance" (John Dugdale Literary Review)

"By any standards, [the story “Trilobites”] is a masterpiece; that it is an artistic debut is astonishing... To say that Breece D’J Pancake is not well enough known is a massive understatement... Quite simply, a literary genius" (John Burnside Guardian)

"Impressive" (Philip Maughan New Statesman)

The stories in this collection nearly all take place in and around the mountain hollows of West Virginia: a world of cock-fighting, coal-mining, deer-stalking, sex, depression, drinking and death.

'It would be easy to allow his one collection of stories to be buried under the landslide of books published every year. But it’s worth doing a little excavating to dig it up. The past few years have seen late-in-the-day and posthumous revivals of interest in writers such ... John Williams. Get out your pickaxes'
New Yorker

Breece D’J Pancake left behind an astonishing achievement. He was a master of a distinctly American vernacular, which he used to remind us of all the ways that fiction could teach us about ourselves. These stories are absolutely essential reading - Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds