Ann Pancake is a native of West Virginia. Her first novel was based on interviews with West Virginians living in the shadow of mountaintop removal mining. Strange As this Weather Has Been was on Kirkus's Top Ten Fiction List, won the 2007 Weatherford Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. She has also received an NEA grant, the Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bakeless Award for her first collection of stories, Given Ground.
"The most compelling aspect of the book is the way a community's
collective voice seems to permeate each story....Pancake's stories
possess a rough beauty, and also an edge....these stories are worth
the wait."-Orion
"Much lauded Seattle-based writer Ann Pancake has a remarkable gift
for bringing West Virginia (her childhood home) to life on the
page. This new collection of short stories and novellas includes
vivid tales of working-class folks living amid the devastation of a
type of strip mining known as mountain top removal. She imbues her
characters with powerful, poetic voices, and unspools each story-of
misfortune, family loyalty, long-held secrets-with a mixture of
tension and mystery that unearths many strata of emotion."
-Seattle Magazine
"Pancake's bravura tales carry the pulse of a betrayed yet
beautiful place of loyalty and resilience." - Booklist
"Many of these stories by novelist Pancake (Strange as This
Weather Has Been, 2007, etc.) are told from the perspectives of
children and adolescents, the better to capture the eeriness of the
Appalachian landscape and the folkways of the grown-ups who occupy
it.. . . her ear for dialect is well-tuned, and the collection has
its comic touches.. . . smartly styled. . . " -Kirkus
". . . gritty, stylish assembly. . . well-crafted collection."
-Publishers Weekly
"These are astonishing stories--tender, alive, full of heart and
empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets
and surprises but always subtle, full of knotty, poetic language,
but also remarkably naturalistic. In her unflinching and lovingly
accurate attention to the lives of the working poor, people who
have fallen entirely beneath the radar of our literary notice, she
occasionally calls to mind the haunting photographs of Walker
Evans, but I don't think there's anyone else like Ann in American
letters. She is a true original, and I urge with all my heart to
read these gorgeous stories. Ann Pancake is one of the best we
have." -Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake and Await Your
Reply
"These are astonishing stories--tender, alive, full of heart and
empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets
and surprises but always subtle, full of knotty, poetic language,
but also remarkably naturalistic. In her unflinching and lovingly
accurate attention to the lives of the working poor, people who
have fallen entirely beneath the radar of our literary notice, she
occasionally calls to mind the haunting photographs of Walker
Evans, but I don't think there's anyone else like Ann in American
letters. She is a true original, and I urge with all my heart to
read these gorgeous stories. Ann Pancake is one of the best we
have." -Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake and Await Your
Reply
"In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, Ann Pancake writes
her way deep into the marrow of one of America's wildest and most
brutally wounded landscapes, and into the secret lives of its
inhabitants, young and old. Her characters' dreams and misfortunes
range from comic misadventure to haunting spiritual quest, and
their voices, alive with hope and sorrow, restore lush color and
rhythm to our lives. Like a water-dowser in thirsty times, Ann
Pancake holds the divining-rod of language in her gifted hands, and
reveals a mysterious world we can't afford to lose." -Marjorie
Sandor
Praise for Strange As This Weather Has Been:
"[P]owerful, sure-footed and haunting..."-The New York
Times
"Pancake's novel is shockingly pure, like holding gold in your
hands, or wheat--all the chaff winnowed away." - Orion
Magazine
"Lush descriptions of the landscape are matched with a hurtling
stream-of-consciousness narration to great effect: one doubts
neither the characters' voices nor their places in a very complex
poverty." -Publishers Weekly
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