Pancake Day for Random

02.05.14 | Anna James - The Bookseller

Random House is publishing another backlist title, Trilobites & Other Stories by Breece D’J Pancake (£8.99), as a Vintage Classic in July.

Robin Robertson, deputy publisher at Jonathan Cape, said Vintage has been “emboldened by the success of Stoner” to re-release the book of short stories, which was originally published in the UK in 1992 on Robertson’s Secker & Warburg list. Robertson ran the list with Random House publisher Dan Franklin; he said it sought to publish “contemporary, eccentric authors . . . If I’d known about Stoner then I would have put it in”. Clara Nelson, associate editor at Vintage, raised the idea of re-releasing Trilobites to Robertson, who said  “it would have been on my list” of titles to be reissued.

The stories are set in and around Shardsville, West Virginia. Robertson described them as:  “A complex mix of hard and soft—which I admired then and still look for in writers. He has an economy of language usually reserved for poets.”  The stories are about people struggling with lives of loss and cruelty, and it boasts glowing reviews from writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, who described Pancake as:  “An exceptional voice: gritty, mordant, invested with the texture of stroked reality; urgent and haunting.”

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