Download or read book Stories of Breece D J Pancake written by Breece D'J Pancake and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.
Download or read book The Stories of Breece D j Pancake written by Breece D'J Pancake and published by . This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.
Download or read book A Room Forever written by Thomas E. Douglass and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After twenty-six-year-old author Breece D'J Pancake took his own life in April 1979, the West Virginian's posthumously published short-story collection made a considerable impact on the world of letters. His work was praised for a controlled muscular style reminiscent of Hemingway, for its strong undercurrent of emotion, and for its evocation of the blighted lives of the mountain poor. In A Room Forever, Thomas E. Douglass offers a detailed portrait of Pancake's short life, examining the varied circumstances and emotional forces that led to the writer's suicide and exploring Pancake's influence on contemporary fiction generally and Appalachian writing in particular.Drawing on notebooks, letters, and manuscripts left by Pancake as well as numerous conversations and interviews with family, friends, and others, Douglass has recreated the key events of the young artist's life: his West Virginia childhood, his romantic losses, his education as a writer at the University of Virginia, and the acceptance of his work by the East Coast literary establishment. Through analysis of the story fragments reproduced in this volume, including The Conqueror and Shouting Victory, Douglass illustrates the recurring themes -- such as fear of failure and the inability to escape disaster -- that Pancake expressed so eloquently in his work, and he shows their origins in the writer's own personal history. Douglass examines the degree to which Pancake drew on his memories of life in Appalachia and discusses Pancake's influence on other Appalachian writers such as Pinckney Benedict. Douglass argues that Pancake's posthumous collection, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, brought a renewed interest in regional writing to the national literary scene. A Room Forever brings to life the artistic sensibility and inner turmoil of a legendary figure in contemporary southern letters.
Download or read book The Collected Breece D J Pancake Stories Fragments Letters written by Breece D'J Pancake and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive edition of the haunted and haunting stories of the legendary West Virginia writer, with rare unfinished stories and fragments and revealing letters Breece D'J Pancake published only a handful of stories before he took his own life in 1979, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Those stories and a small number of others found among his papers after his death comprise the remarkable posthumous collection The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983), recognized at the time as "an American Dubliners" (Jayne Anne Phillips) and a collection by a "young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's" (Joyce Carol Oates). Kurt Vonnegut called him "merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read." Today his diverse admirers include Margaret Atwood, Andre Dubus III, Tom Waits, and Lorde. The Collected Breece D'J Pancake brings together the original landmark book, several story drafts and fragments, and a selection of Pancake's letters to offer an unprecedented picture of his life and art. Among the unfinished stories are fragments from Pancake's two planned novels. The letters document his relationship with writers such as Peter Taylor, John Casey, James Alan McPherson, and Mary Lee Settle, and offer a picture of his collaborative relationship with his mother, who sent him newspaper clippings and helped him research his stories. "Pancake's stories are the only stories written in just this way," Jayne Anne Phillips writes in her introduction, "from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others." At once beautiful and relentlessly bleak, the stories concern miners, truckers, farmers, waitresses, and others facing constricted economic and life prospects. In one way or another, his characters are stuck, hoping for a change in fortune they can neither relinquish nor quite bring themselves to believe in, the land and the past making equally strong claims on their darkening present.
Download or read book Airships written by Barry Hannah and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award, Airships is a “strong, original, tragic and funny” story collection of “the creative Southern tradition” (Alfred Kazin). One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new American South—a land of high school band contests where good old boys from Vicksburg are reunited in Vietnam, and petty nostalgia and the incessant pain of disappointed love prevail in spite of our worst efforts. Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as “the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor,” Barry Hannah’s immense storytelling gifts are on striking display in this essential work. “Hannah takes fiction by surprise—scenes, shocks, sounds and amazements: an explosive but meticulous originality.” —Cynthia Ozick
Download or read book Stories of Breece D J Pancake written by Breece D'J Pancake and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.
Download or read book Town Smokes written by Pinckney Benedict and published by Arrow. This book was released on 1995 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of nine short stories set in the American South, depicted as odd and idiosyncratic. Emerging from the harsh realities of difficult lives, the stories are full of the violence of love and the love of violence. The author won the 1995 Steinbeck Award for Dogs of God.
Download or read book John Wayne s America written by Garry Wills and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg brings his eloquence, wit, and on-target perceptions of American life and politics to this fascinating, well-drawn protrait of a twentieth-century hero. In this work of great originality—the biography of an idea—Garry Wills shows how John Wayne came to embody Amercian values and influenced our cultoure to a degree unmatched by any other public figure of his time. In Wills's hands, Waynes story is tranformed into a compelling narrative about the intersection of popular entertainment and political realities in mid-twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Kentucky Straight written by Chris Offutt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kentucky straight is bourbon with no mixer. Kentucky Straight is Kentucky seen without nostalgic gloss. These riveting, often heartbreaking stories, take us through country that is unmapped. They are set in a nameless Appalachian community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation; where hunting is not a sport but a means of survival. These are stories of coal miners and backwoods medicine men, of gamblers and marijuana farmers, tales of real tragedy and unutterable strangeness that convey their sense of place so vividly that we feel its ground rise beneath our feet. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award.
Download or read book Trilobites and Other Stories written by Breece Pancake and published by Vintage Classic. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 itâe(tm)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 Dâe(tm)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
Download or read book A Reverence for Wood written by Eric Sloane and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2004-02-18 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book underscores the important role that wood has played in the development of American life and culture. Covering such topics as the aesthetics of wood, wooden implements, and carpentry, Sloane remarks expansively and with affection on the resourcefulness of Early Americans in their use of this precious commodity.
Download or read book Starling written by Kirsten Cram and published by . This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Quinn's young life has never been marked by stability, and it's about to turn upside down again. When her mother abruptly decides to move the pair from their small Canadian town to an area that is even more remote, Alice is left to navigate the strange and hostile community on her own. She is befriended by a classmate named Remy, who hails from his own bleak circumstances, and the two forge a bond that helps to buffer the forces prevailing against them. The story follows Alice and Remy through the everyday beauties and terrors of childhood, capturing their startling resilience while at the mercy of whims and cruelties beyond their control. Despite the vile treatment Alice endures at the hands of her teacher, the persecutions of a local bully, and the disturbing presence of her mother's new boyfriend, she retains an outlook on the world marked by optimism and wonder, enhanced at times by her own imagination. Remy, who is enduring physical abuse at home, adopts a more cynical approach to life. Between them and with the assistance of a mysterious neighbor, the children find a haven for their bright and curious minds, as well as the essence of meaning they are both seeking in this grim and unpredictable world.
Download or read book Princess and the Pickup Truck written by Bil Lepp and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isn't it time there was a fairy tale aimed at girls and women who wear hiking boots, don't comb their hair, and love pick-up trucks? The prince in this story wants to marry a real mountain princess, so he searches all the mountain ranges in the world? looking in the Sierras for women in tiaras, and at Glass Mountain for ladies wearing just one shoe. He ends up going home alone, only to be found by a princess who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to set out into the world on her own to find it. The Princess and the Pick-up Truck is a modern retelling of The Princess and the Pea, but with an Appalachian, or at least rural, slant.Bil's inspiration:We all know what happens when a princess kisses a frog, but what happens when a prince kisses a fraud?I was driving a winding West Virginia road with my teenage daughter, and in front of us was a pickup truck with several mattresses heaped haphazardly in the bed. I said to my daughter, "Do you think you could sleep on that? "My daughter has mastered teen sarcasm, but she's not nasty about it. She is one of the absolute funniest people I know. She twisted her bangs in her fingers, smacked her imaginary gum, and said saccharinely, "Of course I could, Daddy. I'm a princess!" And this story was born."The Princess and the Pickup Truck...is perfect for princesses who prefer hiking boots." -LA Parenting Magazine
Download or read book Island of Wings written by Karin Altenberg and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011-12-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling debut novel of love and loss, faith and atonement, on an untamed nineteenth-century Scottish island. Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, Island of Wings is a richly imagined novel about two people struggling to keep their love, and their family, alive in a place of extreme hardship and unearthly beauty. Everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil McKenzie when they arrive at the St. Kilda islands in July of 1830. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders, and Lizzie-bright, beautiful, and devoted-is pregnant with their first child. As the two adjust to life at the edge of civilization, where the natives live in squalor and babies perish mysteriously, their marriage-and their sanity-are soon threatened.
Download or read book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia written by Elizabeth Catte and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider's perspective on the region.
Download or read book Hard Candy written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1954 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Red Convertible written by Louise Erdrich and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Culled from 30 years as one of America’s most distinctive fictional voices . . . 36 affecting and inventive stories that dance around the Faulknerian world she’s created. . . . Within these stories there exist Erdrich’s poetic sentences and humane sensibility—and always another surprise on the next page.” — Boston Globe A collection of breathtaking power and originality by one of the most innovative and exciting writers of our day In Louise Erdrich's fictional world, the mystical can emerge from the everyday, the comic can turn suddenly tragic, and violence and splendor inhabit a single emotional landscape. The fantastic twists and leaps of her imagination are made all the more meaningful by the deeper truth of human feeling that underlies them. These thirty-six short works selected by the author herself—including five previously unpublished stories—are ordered chronologically as well as by theme and voice, each tale spellbinding in its boldness and beauty. The Red Convertible is a stunning literary achievement, the collected brilliance of a fearless and inventive writer.
