{LMC}: A reaction to the letter Breece D’J Pancake wrote but did not send to his mother before his 1979 suicide
If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.
This little nest of a letter, built up of hollow bones and shed feathers made me want to go read everything by Breece D’J Pancake, which is relatively easy to do since there’s just the one book; The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1983) Each tale therein unfolded with the same peripheral soul with a rainbow of great country names, walking in the woods, half-seducing a woman, finding their manhood an effective if clumsy tool for survival.
The stories, culled mostly from The Atlantic Monthly, are trance-inducing, dream-things. People and objects move by cresting, just clearing the ditches and hills in which they hide. In one, the way headlights came over the rise caught the man who was in turn being watched by a rabbit was like being caught in actual headlights yourself.