Breece DJ Pancake cut short a remarkably promising career when he took his own life in 1979 at the age of 26. In 1983 Little, Brown and Companys posthumous publication of this booka collection of stories that depict, with astonishing power and grace, the world of Pancakes native rural West Virginiaelectrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. The Stories of Breece DJ Pancake has remained continuously in print, and Back Bay Books takes pride in now making the collection available in this new trade paperback edition. Andre Dubus III, who contributes a new introduction to this edition, is the author of the #1 bestseller House of Sand and Fog. A perennial favorite among aspiring writers, participants in creative writing programs, and students of contemporary American fiction. Trilobites, the first of Pancakes stories to be published in The Atlantic, elicited an extraordinary response from readers in 1977 and continues to be widely anthologized. Upon its initial publication, The Stories of Breece DJ Pancake received front-page reviews in newspapers and literary periodicals throughout the country.

Breece D'J Pancake was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic