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Given Ground
Departing from Appalachia's 150-year-old literary legacy of formula and caricature, West Virginia native Ann Pancake uses the texture of language, an intense attention to place, and complexity of characterization to recreate the region -- its tragic history and fragile culture, the interior landscapes of its people, and their deep rootedness in a threatened land. Her characters, already marginalized economically and socially, confront what many perceive as an invading outside culture, enduring and at times transcending the loss of their "place," both literally and figuratively. Their stories undermine the assumption that just because people don't articulate what happens inside them, nothing much is happening at all.
136 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2001
2 people are currently reading
440 people want to read
About the author
Ann Pancake
13 books56 followersAnn Pancake is an American fiction writer and essayist. She has published short stories and essays describing the people and atmosphere of Appalachia, often from the first-person perspective of those living there. While fictional, her short stories contribute to an understanding of poverty in the 20th century, as well as the historical roots of American and rural poverty. She graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University with a degree in English. She earned her M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
July 26, 2025
Wowsers. Published in 2001, Ann Pancake’s award-winning debut Given Ground is quite unlike anything I’ve read before. Not only probably one of the best books I’ve read set in West Virginia, it’s also one of the best short story collections I’ve read. Why? The stories are abstract and enigmatic, yet there’s a gritty, pitiless quality to them. The characters are far removed from mainstream America.
“Foreigners. From-away-from-here. They talked like people on TV, that whitewashed talk of people from no place.”
In ‘Ghostless’ a father teaches his son to see the ghosts of Confederate soldiers, ‘Jolo’ is a haunting story about a girl who falls in love with a boy who was badly burned in a fire as a child. They are both incredible stories, although my favourite was probably 'Redneck Boys'.
Floods, violence, the vicious circle of poverty are bleak subjects, but all are crafted with guile and lyricism. The use of language is remarkable, poetic and beautiful. It’s just brilliant, I loved it. Appalachian writing does not get much better than this.
“Foreigners. From-away-from-here. They talked like people on TV, that whitewashed talk of people from no place.”
In ‘Ghostless’ a father teaches his son to see the ghosts of Confederate soldiers, ‘Jolo’ is a haunting story about a girl who falls in love with a boy who was badly burned in a fire as a child. They are both incredible stories, although my favourite was probably 'Redneck Boys'.
Floods, violence, the vicious circle of poverty are bleak subjects, but all are crafted with guile and lyricism. The use of language is remarkable, poetic and beautiful. It’s just brilliant, I loved it. Appalachian writing does not get much better than this.
May 26, 2022
"A mi padre lo acosaban los fantasmas, los veía igual que otra gente detecta las últimas moras en el clamor de una zarza o una trucha en la sombra de ina raíz sumergida."
Es complicado escribir sobre algo con lo que conecto mucho y en este caso es doblemente difícil porque a veces te parece que tus palabras no van a ser suficientes para expresar todo lo que estos relatos de Ann Pancake me han mostrado. Unos relatos que he ido alargando leyendo uno al día sintiendo además el pleno placer de la anticipación sabiendo que estaban ahí. En un principio, puede parecer que no entiendes nada de lo que te está contando porque cuando empiezas un relato la autora no desvela enseguida quien es el narrador, si es hombre o mujer o que edad puede tener. Ann Pancake te envuelve con su estilo eligiendo con cuidado las palabras, las frases, la elipsis y vas sumergiéndote en la historia sin saber quien es exactamente el narrador. Pero a medida que la historia avanza, poco a poco se va perfilando con absoluta claridad quien te está contando ese instante de vida: un pequeñísimo detalle te hace atisbarlo todo. Es fantástica la forma en que plantea todo el relato porque llegado un punto casi que te da igual la historia y solo puedes disfrutar la emoción del momento.
"Y entonces ya está de vuelta y nota de golpe todo el peso."
El primer relato "Sin Fantasmas" (Ghostless) ya de de por sí sienta las bases de quién es Ann Pancake, y es un cuento que me hizo volar la cabeza. Es totalmente perfecto en lo que plantea y en el cómo lo plantea y no voy a desvelar mucho más porque como ya he mencionado, la única forma en que se pueden disfrutar estos relatos es dejándote llevar, sumergiéndote y sin saber con antelación nada de ellos, ni argumentalmente ni nada más, porque la gracia está en esa forma que tienen de abrirse al lector.
"Miré al hombre que estaba al otro lado de la mesa. Había una oscuridad en mi tío. Cuando era más pequeño no le tenía miedo, pero la oscuridad ha acabado apoderándose de él, y ahora sí que me daba miedo. La furia se fraguaba en algún oscuro recoveco de su cuerpo. Desde donde al final se liberaría y se desbocaría hasta apoderarse de su cerebro."
Ann Pancake va por libre a la hora de encajar la historia, a la hora de describir a sus personajes, con una elipsis muy presente, las lineas temporales también se camuflan pero todo tiene un sentido a la hora de hacer estos relatos universales: la esencia de lo que cuenta hace que te identifiques totalmente con unos personajes que quizá estén a años luz de tu propia vida tanto fisica como mentalmente y este es el gran misterio con que esta autora imbuye sus relatos. En este sentido la labor de traducción a la hora de conseguir transmitirnos quien es la Pancake es doblemente loable. En fin, una maravilla. Corred a leer a a Ann Pancake!!!
"Porque eso es lo que significa crecer entre largas cordilleras llenas de túneles, no ser nunca de los que parece que van a lograr escapar, no entrar nunca en ese puñado de escogidos que, quizá, pueda ser algo en la vida, nada tuyo llama la atención ni es digno de ser recordado. Ni siquiera mereces el favoritismo que se concede a los más pobres."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
Es complicado escribir sobre algo con lo que conecto mucho y en este caso es doblemente difícil porque a veces te parece que tus palabras no van a ser suficientes para expresar todo lo que estos relatos de Ann Pancake me han mostrado. Unos relatos que he ido alargando leyendo uno al día sintiendo además el pleno placer de la anticipación sabiendo que estaban ahí. En un principio, puede parecer que no entiendes nada de lo que te está contando porque cuando empiezas un relato la autora no desvela enseguida quien es el narrador, si es hombre o mujer o que edad puede tener. Ann Pancake te envuelve con su estilo eligiendo con cuidado las palabras, las frases, la elipsis y vas sumergiéndote en la historia sin saber quien es exactamente el narrador. Pero a medida que la historia avanza, poco a poco se va perfilando con absoluta claridad quien te está contando ese instante de vida: un pequeñísimo detalle te hace atisbarlo todo. Es fantástica la forma en que plantea todo el relato porque llegado un punto casi que te da igual la historia y solo puedes disfrutar la emoción del momento.
"Y entonces ya está de vuelta y nota de golpe todo el peso."
El primer relato "Sin Fantasmas" (Ghostless) ya de de por sí sienta las bases de quién es Ann Pancake, y es un cuento que me hizo volar la cabeza. Es totalmente perfecto en lo que plantea y en el cómo lo plantea y no voy a desvelar mucho más porque como ya he mencionado, la única forma en que se pueden disfrutar estos relatos es dejándote llevar, sumergiéndote y sin saber con antelación nada de ellos, ni argumentalmente ni nada más, porque la gracia está en esa forma que tienen de abrirse al lector.
"Miré al hombre que estaba al otro lado de la mesa. Había una oscuridad en mi tío. Cuando era más pequeño no le tenía miedo, pero la oscuridad ha acabado apoderándose de él, y ahora sí que me daba miedo. La furia se fraguaba en algún oscuro recoveco de su cuerpo. Desde donde al final se liberaría y se desbocaría hasta apoderarse de su cerebro."
Ann Pancake va por libre a la hora de encajar la historia, a la hora de describir a sus personajes, con una elipsis muy presente, las lineas temporales también se camuflan pero todo tiene un sentido a la hora de hacer estos relatos universales: la esencia de lo que cuenta hace que te identifiques totalmente con unos personajes que quizá estén a años luz de tu propia vida tanto fisica como mentalmente y este es el gran misterio con que esta autora imbuye sus relatos. En este sentido la labor de traducción a la hora de conseguir transmitirnos quien es la Pancake es doblemente loable. En fin, una maravilla. Corred a leer a a Ann Pancake!!!
"Porque eso es lo que significa crecer entre largas cordilleras llenas de túneles, no ser nunca de los que parece que van a lograr escapar, no entrar nunca en ese puñado de escogidos que, quizá, pueda ser algo en la vida, nada tuyo llama la atención ni es digno de ser recordado. Ni siquiera mereces el favoritismo que se concede a los más pobres."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
January 22, 2016
In the front of this book the publication data is 1. Southern States-Social life and customs-Fiction and 2. Maturation (Psychology)-Fiction. I can't seem to define what makes me like these short stories so much, but I think it has something to do with that word "psychology". I think the author has an insiders knowledge of my brain, maybe yours too. It's a style that is so pleasantly satisfying, sometimes direct, other times so obscure the "non-telling" of the story provides inherent meaning. The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. It is a veering accumulation of sentences. The style is firm, faintly hypnotic, with the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences creating a sort of magic. I am declaring this a Classic among short story collections.
September 2, 2012
Shaking on the way home with this book in hand, finishing the first story "Ghostless." I did not see, nor hear, anything else around me on the bus/subway ride through Philadelphia. I am not sure how I made it back to the apartment, but it has nothing to do with Swedenborg. Whatever the rest of this collection offers, Ann Pancake's name is one I will think of as often as the leaves shiver. Yes, I am ready to move.
Three days have passed since I wrote the above paragraph just after reading "Ghostless." I have now finished Ann Pancake's stories and must say this woman stays brave and intense to the very end. To describe her to someone who has not read her, I would say these stories are Breece Pancake meets Faulkner meets Virginia Woolf. Ann Pancake succeeds in so many difficult areas with this collection, crafting the stories with such delicacy and urgency. The language and lyricism is stunning, building from sounds and images, breaking all the rules of traditional sentence structure, creating word combinations that were just meant to be. But like Woolf, unlike many others, the lyricism works to build something even grander and more beautiful. She puts you in, on, and under the West Virginia dirt, quite literally and metaphorically, while simultaneously sifting and lifting and revealing that soil's mythic dimensions. You can separate her from much of the Appalachian fiction being written today: there is not a stereotype one in these stories for an outsider to latch on, but there are lots of ghosts and lots of mythic history. Chilling is one way to put it: the love which Ann Pancake put into these stories, not only from the angle of language and storytelling, but from her own spirit, puts them into a class that very few writers can touch. This is not only a talented and rare voice, but one with the vision to match.
Three days have passed since I wrote the above paragraph just after reading "Ghostless." I have now finished Ann Pancake's stories and must say this woman stays brave and intense to the very end. To describe her to someone who has not read her, I would say these stories are Breece Pancake meets Faulkner meets Virginia Woolf. Ann Pancake succeeds in so many difficult areas with this collection, crafting the stories with such delicacy and urgency. The language and lyricism is stunning, building from sounds and images, breaking all the rules of traditional sentence structure, creating word combinations that were just meant to be. But like Woolf, unlike many others, the lyricism works to build something even grander and more beautiful. She puts you in, on, and under the West Virginia dirt, quite literally and metaphorically, while simultaneously sifting and lifting and revealing that soil's mythic dimensions. You can separate her from much of the Appalachian fiction being written today: there is not a stereotype one in these stories for an outsider to latch on, but there are lots of ghosts and lots of mythic history. Chilling is one way to put it: the love which Ann Pancake put into these stories, not only from the angle of language and storytelling, but from her own spirit, puts them into a class that very few writers can touch. This is not only a talented and rare voice, but one with the vision to match.
January 30, 2008
Pancake's writing style is one that is both truly unique and breathtakingly powerful. Reminiscent of the great southern writer William Faulkner, Ann Pancake weaves stories of rural Appalachia in the full spectrum of grit and hardship, but she avoids falling into common hillbilly traps of ignorance and destitution. These stories are a gut punch in the best way. They hit hard, and they leave their mark. I read this initially right when it came out, and "Jolo" still haunts me eight years later--that's the power of Pancake's fiction.
August 22, 2007
This is one of the best books I've ever read. If I had to run out of my burning house, and I could save only an armload of books, this is one of the first I'd grab. I will only do it an injustice by trying to describe it. Just read it. It's brilliant.
February 28, 2021
A collection of uniformly well-crafted short stories about northeast West Virginia. These are not sentimental stories of country folk; they are unsparing in describing the grotesques and smells you find there. These bleak stories inhabit a place in decline -- lost farms, lost lives, destruction from flood, etc. but without the shrill propaganda of "message" fiction. Recommended but not for the sensitive.
PS - people who want to read fiction about the effect of mountaintop removal look elsewhere. There is no coal mining in this book.
PS - people who want to read fiction about the effect of mountaintop removal look elsewhere. There is no coal mining in this book.
April 1, 2012
There are some books so turgid that you can smell their plodding evil all the way from the parking lot of the Jiffy Book Mart. Others provide you with a temporary thrill at the beach and take your mind off the sharks gnawing through human flesh only yards from your towel. Then there are the rare volumes that are a feast for the soul and mind and that provide rich new treasures with repeated reading. Ann Pancake's Given Ground is just such a book.
Given Ground is a collection of 12 stories written over a 13-year period. These are poetically textured tales of class and identity struggle in contemporary Appalachia, with the natural environment of West Virginia itself a main character throughout. As the narrator of "Crow Season" observes from the bed of his truck: "The way the land lays in here looks more like a human body than any land I've ever seen, pictures or real. And I often wonder if that's the reason for the hold it has on us."
It's the human characters' sensual connection to nature that separates them from the "outsiders," "imports," and "weekenders" who come into their land through outside wealth, often to exploit the resources of the land or the labor of its people. No one wants to trust folks who "talked like people on TV, that whitewashed talk of people from no place."
At least two of the stories--"Ghostless," from which the quote above comes, and "Bait"--deserve to be anthologized and passed on through time. "Ghostless," the first story of the collection, is the tale of a young boy who is taken from his home when his father dies and sent to live with relatives. His father saw ghosts regularly, but the spirits didn't frighten father or son. "Here was thick with ghosts as it was with deer, my daddy told me, all of them pushed in from the outside. Think, he told me. There's no place else for them to go." When the son leaves his home, he leaves the ghosts behind too.
The only fearsome ghosts in these stories are the metaphorical ones characters become when cut off from their roots. This theme shows up often in this collection, most notably in "Crow Season," wherein a character reveals, "I keep no mirrors in my place. I tell what I look like in others' faces, me make-them-gasp identical. I know that I've grown into a ghost."
"Bait" is somewhat of a comic-relief piece set in the middle of the more serious and brooding stories, although the humor is dark and gently macabre, along the lines of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. A teenaged bait-shop employee deals with her morbid boss--a differently abled uncle who believes he is a rescue worker and is constantly in search of bodies--and the possibility that she may be pregnant. As she shepherds her uncle and answers people's questions about the latest car wreck on the accident-prone road in front of the shop, she frets about her late period, fearing that if she is pregnant she will be caught forever in this feeble whirlwind of life.
Pancake's stories are often visionary in their way of revealing a peoples' consciousness, which is alive with an almost pantheist appreciation of nature. The tales in Given Ground place her in the tony lineage of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
Given Ground is a collection of 12 stories written over a 13-year period. These are poetically textured tales of class and identity struggle in contemporary Appalachia, with the natural environment of West Virginia itself a main character throughout. As the narrator of "Crow Season" observes from the bed of his truck: "The way the land lays in here looks more like a human body than any land I've ever seen, pictures or real. And I often wonder if that's the reason for the hold it has on us."
It's the human characters' sensual connection to nature that separates them from the "outsiders," "imports," and "weekenders" who come into their land through outside wealth, often to exploit the resources of the land or the labor of its people. No one wants to trust folks who "talked like people on TV, that whitewashed talk of people from no place."
At least two of the stories--"Ghostless," from which the quote above comes, and "Bait"--deserve to be anthologized and passed on through time. "Ghostless," the first story of the collection, is the tale of a young boy who is taken from his home when his father dies and sent to live with relatives. His father saw ghosts regularly, but the spirits didn't frighten father or son. "Here was thick with ghosts as it was with deer, my daddy told me, all of them pushed in from the outside. Think, he told me. There's no place else for them to go." When the son leaves his home, he leaves the ghosts behind too.
The only fearsome ghosts in these stories are the metaphorical ones characters become when cut off from their roots. This theme shows up often in this collection, most notably in "Crow Season," wherein a character reveals, "I keep no mirrors in my place. I tell what I look like in others' faces, me make-them-gasp identical. I know that I've grown into a ghost."
"Bait" is somewhat of a comic-relief piece set in the middle of the more serious and brooding stories, although the humor is dark and gently macabre, along the lines of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. A teenaged bait-shop employee deals with her morbid boss--a differently abled uncle who believes he is a rescue worker and is constantly in search of bodies--and the possibility that she may be pregnant. As she shepherds her uncle and answers people's questions about the latest car wreck on the accident-prone road in front of the shop, she frets about her late period, fearing that if she is pregnant she will be caught forever in this feeble whirlwind of life.
Pancake's stories are often visionary in their way of revealing a peoples' consciousness, which is alive with an almost pantheist appreciation of nature. The tales in Given Ground place her in the tony lineage of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
January 20, 2025
This is my second Ann Pancake book, which I immediately ordered after reading her staggering debut novel. This short story collection won tons of awards back in 2001, and it's easy to see why. Regulars to my page will know by now that I am not a huge short story fan, which means there has to be something unique on display in order for me to give a collection a go, and in this case it's the sublime texture of her prose. I have rarely come across prose that is so embodied and raw and hypnotic - the way she describes a sense of place is unparalleled, the voice of nature always up there playing rough among the main characters - you can literally taste the earth in your mouth as she moves through the mythic forests and mountains of her beloved Appalachia. Plus the way she turns nouns into verbs and then uses verbs in really unexpected places is just a delight - you are never, ever bored, and that's purely because of the prose itself running physical in your mouth. The stories themselves are bleak, heart-breaking, and magical, like tiny windows into a world (and a people) that time forgot. This is an intense and intimate look at West Virginia like you've never seen before. Ann Pancake is a talented and rare voice, and I really wish she would hurry up and write another bloody novel.
Oh and btw, 4 stars is basically a full house score for a short story collection, I am never (or at least, I haven't yet) given a short story collection 5 stars. That's just how it is.
Oh and btw, 4 stars is basically a full house score for a short story collection, I am never (or at least, I haven't yet) given a short story collection 5 stars. That's just how it is.
January 7, 2008
Ann Pancake is an amazing writer. Her writing is just so beautiful and lyrical and it also has great emotional depth. These are stories to read slowly and savor. Sometimes though I am seriously overwhelmed by the density of her prose, which is why the four stars instead of five. "Jolo" is awesome. I also enjoyed "Redneck Boys." These stories are worth re-reading.
June 25, 2010
One of the best short story collections I have ever read. Ann Pancake has a keen sense of place and dialect. Her characters from Appalachian rural life are full of strength and subbornness. While many of the stories seem hard and bleak, any reader who sits down with Given Ground will walk away amazed at the characters' sheer fortitude to trudge through life.
January 4, 2013
Amazing language around her love of this region. Great set of stories!
October 16, 2022
I could only read one or two of these at a time, the weight was so heavy. “Ghostless,” “Dirt,” and “Bait” are the highlights. Especially “Ghostless” and “Dirt.” And “Bait.”
April 22, 2023
Given Ground by Ann Pancake (Middlebury College Press) (813.6) (3773).
I’m an Ann Pancake fan. I loved her short story collection Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (2015) as well as her novel Strange As This Weather Has Been (2007).
Ann Pancake is “grit lit” to the bone, and that’s fine by me.
Given Ground (2007) was the author’s first published work. l read her later stuff first, and then I doubled back to see what her earliest work looked like.
While several of the stories in Given Ground showed flashes of great promise, the dozen short stories in this collection did not speak to me as her later work has done so eloquently. The tales that make up Given Ground were often a touch too abstract for me. I simply could not follow or understand the author’s allusions. The symbolism employed in many of the tales was just abstract and murky enough that at the conclusions, I often found myself thinking, “Wait! What??”
There were notable exceptions, of course. The stories “Sister” and “Bait” were self-explanatory, and “Wappatomaka” seems to have been an early draft of the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been.
I nominate Ann Pancake to the literary all-star team (Southern Division).
My rating: 7/10, finished 4/22/23 (3773).
January 10, 2023
This is the first book I've read by Ann Pancake. As someone from and still living in Appalachia, I was a little taken aback by the dismal tone of every single story. Were they well-crafted and hauntingly beautiful tales? Absolutely. Is there a lot of truth in them about what Appalachia looks like these days? For sure. However, I feel that if someone not very well-acquainted with Appalachia were to read this, they would assume it's all a depressing sh**-hole, and so I don't feel the book dispels Appalachian stereotypes as much as it claims to. I would like to see a little more balance. Though Appalachian people, by and large, have always struggled economically, they also have long-standing wholesome and meaningful traditions that make for tight-knit, healthy (often faith-based) communities with lots of love and neighborliness. You won't find much of that in this book....hopefully in another of Pancake's you will? I don't know, but despite my criticisms, I will definitely be reading more Pancake.
July 14, 2020
Themes of loss. Of determination - or resignation. Reading these stories, following people’s thought patterns, really felt like being inside someone’s head. She’s a stunning writer, up there with Alice Munro on the ability to craft a character or in this case, a place in very few pages. (Though her structure is less straightforward than Munro, and more like rushing down a creek at the bottom of a hollow, bumping into rocks that briefly change your course but always carrying on and on.)
June 19, 2017
Another heavyweight entry into the sadly non-existent canon of vernacular American short fiction. Pancake's invocation of the landscape is so masterful that Appalachia is almost tactile in her stories.
Jolo is one of the greatest short stories I have ever read, with Ghostless and Bait snapping at its heels.
Jolo is one of the greatest short stories I have ever read, with Ghostless and Bait snapping at its heels.
August 13, 2013
A few notable quotes:
"Every Christmas Lindy'd stand beside the conveyor belt under electronic monitors with the other passengers, well-dressed and cologned. Behind her, silent and just out of sight, the odor of hunting jacket, of little-washed man, and of the wood smoke he's carried all the way from the house. She knows her father'll try to merge his rust-bitten Chevrolet Citation onto the freeway outside the airport and be forced onto the shoulder before he can snatch his little piece of road. They'll sit across the plastic table under fluorescent lights in Leesburg while he halves a Big mac with his pocketknife, rinses the blade in a cup of water, and dries it in his handkerchief." pg 14
"Shane cuts her a look with snakebit in it. When she leaves the bedroom, he tries to slam the door behind her, but flimsy like it is, it makes only a shabby smack.
She finds herself on the heap of cinderblocks that is their front stoop. The block she sits on wobbles. From under the trailer, a white cat skits out, petrifies at the sight of her, then bullets around the back. It shows clear the knobs of its shoulders and hips, and Lindy recalls first moving out of here. Then most of the dogs and cats outside looked fat. Now the ones inside looked skinny." pg 17
"Her mother had lost several between Lindy and DeeDee. 'Your mother's people have always had an easy time getting pregnant, a hard time staying that way,' her father would say." pg 18
"Connie, on the other hand, is neither disfigured nor desirable. She was born, she knows, with a mild mistake for a face. Her hips and thighs have blossomed enormous, the way the other girls' will, it is true, shortly after high school, but instead of that inspiring sympathy for Connie, it just makes her more ignored. Connie a fleshy premonition no wants to acknowledge, prematurely middle-aged even by the yardstick of a place where middle age can strike in one's twenties." pg 25
"Nearly every other night when Connie wedges herself out the first-story window, suspecting nothing. Their oldest daughter, as far as they're concerned, as sexual as a potato." pg 28
"Kenny's picture sat on top of the TV for years, him startled and midgety under his hat. Army hat like a stewpot upside down on Kenny's tiny head, that big chin looping out like a gourd. Eventually the picture traveled to the bookcase and then on to the wall of the basement stairs, but by that time Mommy, too, had passed. Held on for nine months after the diagnosis and got religion near the end, but she never gave up those cigarettes. Tempered the tar with God." pg 58
"I knew that although neither one of us was happy, she'd learned not to ask her disappointment as many questions." pg 97
"Richard always called it love. Ten years of late suppers and, even on weekends, him asleep in front of the TV by eight p.m. Two hours later, he'd wake and they'd shift to the bed, the brief bucking there. Afterwards, he'd sleep again, as sudden and as deep as if he'd been cold-cocked. Richard was a good boy and a hard worker. And now he's waited two weeks, in his patient, plodding way, to be killed in a car wreck. That week's driver asleep at the wheel ten miles short of home after a day of drywalling." pg 106
"Most of this land would have been my inheritance, and I grew up hunting it, cutting wood off it, running it. I know it better than anyone still living, including the man who owns it now. Never have I seen it so tired, with the deer paths wide as cattle runs up and down the hollow sides, and acornless ground. And the deer themselves, gaunt and puny and sorrowful. Quivering under their flies." pg 113
"The moment the sun falls through, two eyes flash a flat green. Then they go out. I stare harder, but the creature's shrunk from the light. It does not sound again.
Something curls inside me. The dry has drawn it into the well, and there it starves and won't ever get out. And me the last thing to see it, and I can't even tell what it is." pg 115
"As I rode along the smooth-graded gravel road, I squinted to find the good crossing place, where I'd shot a big-bodies eight-point when I was seventeen or so. But near as I could tell, the crossing ran straight through a kit log cabin. And the feel of moving among all those new vacation houses, yet not a soul around. The houses creating an expectation of presence, then their emptiness sucking that expectation inside out. So much emptier on Joby Knob now than when it was just trees." pg 115
"The bullet only has to strike the right place, no bigger than your thumb, and like a key in a lock, it shuts down everything below." pg 134
"Every Christmas Lindy'd stand beside the conveyor belt under electronic monitors with the other passengers, well-dressed and cologned. Behind her, silent and just out of sight, the odor of hunting jacket, of little-washed man, and of the wood smoke he's carried all the way from the house. She knows her father'll try to merge his rust-bitten Chevrolet Citation onto the freeway outside the airport and be forced onto the shoulder before he can snatch his little piece of road. They'll sit across the plastic table under fluorescent lights in Leesburg while he halves a Big mac with his pocketknife, rinses the blade in a cup of water, and dries it in his handkerchief." pg 14
"Shane cuts her a look with snakebit in it. When she leaves the bedroom, he tries to slam the door behind her, but flimsy like it is, it makes only a shabby smack.
She finds herself on the heap of cinderblocks that is their front stoop. The block she sits on wobbles. From under the trailer, a white cat skits out, petrifies at the sight of her, then bullets around the back. It shows clear the knobs of its shoulders and hips, and Lindy recalls first moving out of here. Then most of the dogs and cats outside looked fat. Now the ones inside looked skinny." pg 17
"Her mother had lost several between Lindy and DeeDee. 'Your mother's people have always had an easy time getting pregnant, a hard time staying that way,' her father would say." pg 18
"Connie, on the other hand, is neither disfigured nor desirable. She was born, she knows, with a mild mistake for a face. Her hips and thighs have blossomed enormous, the way the other girls' will, it is true, shortly after high school, but instead of that inspiring sympathy for Connie, it just makes her more ignored. Connie a fleshy premonition no wants to acknowledge, prematurely middle-aged even by the yardstick of a place where middle age can strike in one's twenties." pg 25
"Nearly every other night when Connie wedges herself out the first-story window, suspecting nothing. Their oldest daughter, as far as they're concerned, as sexual as a potato." pg 28
"Kenny's picture sat on top of the TV for years, him startled and midgety under his hat. Army hat like a stewpot upside down on Kenny's tiny head, that big chin looping out like a gourd. Eventually the picture traveled to the bookcase and then on to the wall of the basement stairs, but by that time Mommy, too, had passed. Held on for nine months after the diagnosis and got religion near the end, but she never gave up those cigarettes. Tempered the tar with God." pg 58
"I knew that although neither one of us was happy, she'd learned not to ask her disappointment as many questions." pg 97
"Richard always called it love. Ten years of late suppers and, even on weekends, him asleep in front of the TV by eight p.m. Two hours later, he'd wake and they'd shift to the bed, the brief bucking there. Afterwards, he'd sleep again, as sudden and as deep as if he'd been cold-cocked. Richard was a good boy and a hard worker. And now he's waited two weeks, in his patient, plodding way, to be killed in a car wreck. That week's driver asleep at the wheel ten miles short of home after a day of drywalling." pg 106
"Most of this land would have been my inheritance, and I grew up hunting it, cutting wood off it, running it. I know it better than anyone still living, including the man who owns it now. Never have I seen it so tired, with the deer paths wide as cattle runs up and down the hollow sides, and acornless ground. And the deer themselves, gaunt and puny and sorrowful. Quivering under their flies." pg 113
"The moment the sun falls through, two eyes flash a flat green. Then they go out. I stare harder, but the creature's shrunk from the light. It does not sound again.
Something curls inside me. The dry has drawn it into the well, and there it starves and won't ever get out. And me the last thing to see it, and I can't even tell what it is." pg 115
"As I rode along the smooth-graded gravel road, I squinted to find the good crossing place, where I'd shot a big-bodies eight-point when I was seventeen or so. But near as I could tell, the crossing ran straight through a kit log cabin. And the feel of moving among all those new vacation houses, yet not a soul around. The houses creating an expectation of presence, then their emptiness sucking that expectation inside out. So much emptier on Joby Knob now than when it was just trees." pg 115
"The bullet only has to strike the right place, no bigger than your thumb, and like a key in a lock, it shuts down everything below." pg 134
October 26, 2008
Jolo--say it...Jolo." Jolo is one of the most interesting characters I have read about in recent years. At the age of four, he was in a house fire from which he escaped with grave injuries. His father and baby brother died in this same fire. The skin on his stomach was burned off, as were his nipples. His left ear was partially burned off. The Jolo story is only
one of many.
In another, Pancake writes the story of a young boy
whose father teaches him how to see ghosts--mostly those
of Confederate soldiers. Then the boy's father dies,
and his coffin is placed in the corner of the family's house
for a wake, and then...
I bought this book at the state book festival. My original plan was to read it and give it to my cousin. I had the author sign it "Best Wishes" in case I changed my mind and wanted to keep the book. I changed my mind. This is a collection of short stories full of interesting characters and scenarios. With a lot of the stories you are left hanging, and you have to decide what happened. Some of Ms. Pancake's sentence structure is a little unconventional, and you have to stop to figure out what she meant. Despite the occasional odd sentence, I really enjoyed this book--enough to read it (or at least some of the stories) again. When you read this book, you just feel that Ms. Pancake is very close to these characters and has experienced some of these things (or knows someone who has).
one of many.
In another, Pancake writes the story of a young boy
whose father teaches him how to see ghosts--mostly those
of Confederate soldiers. Then the boy's father dies,
and his coffin is placed in the corner of the family's house
for a wake, and then...
I bought this book at the state book festival. My original plan was to read it and give it to my cousin. I had the author sign it "Best Wishes" in case I changed my mind and wanted to keep the book. I changed my mind. This is a collection of short stories full of interesting characters and scenarios. With a lot of the stories you are left hanging, and you have to decide what happened. Some of Ms. Pancake's sentence structure is a little unconventional, and you have to stop to figure out what she meant. Despite the occasional odd sentence, I really enjoyed this book--enough to read it (or at least some of the stories) again. When you read this book, you just feel that Ms. Pancake is very close to these characters and has experienced some of these things (or knows someone who has).
February 16, 2010
There are prose stylists who whittle their sentences to a fine point, a perfectly-tuned object. There are prose stylists who breathlessly append and append and append to their sentences, extending them outwards; as if, in casting this web of words over experience, somehow its multifarious "reality" can be expressed. Pancake falls into the latter category.
If you have the opportunity to see her read a story in person, by all means do it. That breathless accumulation proves absolutely riveting during a reading(and her accent doesn't hurt, either). Her style, in its extension of time, is nothing if not suspenseful. The writing in this collection is lyrical, visceral, and profoundly effective. However, as with many lyric prose writers I've read, I had a hard time locating the action of the stories - I couldn't picture what was happening; I couldn't picture the characters; I caught myself tangled in the sheen of the language, and its rhythms. I loved the first story, though. It gave me the best kind of chills. I didn't finish the last few, but plan to eventually.
If you have the opportunity to see her read a story in person, by all means do it. That breathless accumulation proves absolutely riveting during a reading(and her accent doesn't hurt, either). Her style, in its extension of time, is nothing if not suspenseful. The writing in this collection is lyrical, visceral, and profoundly effective. However, as with many lyric prose writers I've read, I had a hard time locating the action of the stories - I couldn't picture what was happening; I couldn't picture the characters; I caught myself tangled in the sheen of the language, and its rhythms. I loved the first story, though. It gave me the best kind of chills. I didn't finish the last few, but plan to eventually.
January 30, 2008
Anne Pancake was a visiting writer at Converse College and I happened to be taking a short fiction course at the time. We had the opportunity to read some stories from Given Ground and speak with her in class. She is a passionate person in a complex relationship with her home state of West Virginia. Her stories are dark, bleak, and for the most part devoid of hope, but meeting Pancake makes you realize that she writes out of love for the people of West Virginia, her people, and writes to shed light on the exploitation of the land and people there. I think she encourages a better understanding of the human consequences of years of mining and the troubling new phenomenon of mountaintop removal. Despite her emotions and motivations, Pancake is adventurous with her prose and her characters are fascinating "grotesques" in the new gothic tradition.
April 6, 2012
Ann Pancake’s Given Ground consists of twelve short stories that strike me as the author’s search for truth, for an uncovering of life’s harshest realities, a means of baring them to the light so that we can all learn from them. Pancake uses dialect common to many rural parts of West Virginia in a way that is conversely harsh and poetic, but is nonetheless true to what I know, having lived twenty-four years in those same mountains. It is more than regional vernacular that causes Pancake’s stories to resonate long after readers close the book’s covers, as the subjects she writes about (such as teen pregnancy, natural disasters, dysfunctional families), affect people from all areas, social classes and levels of education.
Highly recommended!
Highly recommended!
June 17, 2015
I need to go right back in and reread these long poetic short stories. Words creep around obviously trying their best to land upright long enough to tell you something is wrong and something is right. You don't get it? Look deeper. Look past the claw marks and the blood. The sharp odor of pine needles might cover up the smell of decay and poisoned liquor but tread cautiously, the apples have worms and the Greyhound sometimes keeps right on going even if you are standing tall, suitcase in hand trying your best to get out before it is too late.
October 23, 2013
Okay! I admit it. I have a crush on Ann Pancake. So it kind of predisposes me to love all these stories, but ALSO they are all really, really good. Gathering Wood is probably my favorite, Redneck Boys, of course Jolo. The way she talks about home kind of kills me. In a good way. I rarely get that kind of intense catharsis from stories, but I'm always looking for it, always waiting, always so relieved when it finds its way to me again. I read these one at a time, like yummy chocolates, pacing myself. I recommend you do the same.
July 20, 2016
Each story in this collection is spellbinding. Each required multiple readings--Ann Pancake winds through these story-worlds so smoothly that I was never able to pinpoint how she got from beginning to end until I turned back to the beginning and started all over again, my eye more finely tuned to her subtle twists and turns. I'm stunned by how intimately she writes about her Appalachia, how thoroughly she explores these hollows and mountains, without any suggestion of cliche or condescension. A new favorite collection.
May 18, 2013
Wonderful writing, the stories are blowing me away, so glad I'm taking her class at the writers fest at Chautauqua next month!
Amazing and heartbreaking stories. I'd never thought of the morality or ethics of buying poor people's land and building fancy second homes right next to people who don't have enough to eat. Not caring about the locals but only of themselves, never wondering or cring what they thought or needed.
Amazing and heartbreaking stories. I'd never thought of the morality or ethics of buying poor people's land and building fancy second homes right next to people who don't have enough to eat. Not caring about the locals but only of themselves, never wondering or cring what they thought or needed.
May 12, 2007
Best definition of voice growing out of place in modern fiction. Stories of ghosts and land and everything that binds us to that essential moment in life, be it a pregnancy test or walking out of a burning house. Quality and efficiency of language is impressive. Mike and I wrestle over who loves this book more. He wins, greasy little man.
January 27, 2021
Loved it. This collection of short stories is just as well-written as her full-length novel, "Strange as This Weather Has Been" but shows off Pancake's diversity in voice a bit more. I'll read it many more times, I'm sure. I don't know if this author is still around. If so, she's a bit elusive, but I certainly hope so. I'ma need more. :P
April 8, 2007
This writer is single handedly one of the most influential writers that I have ever read. These stories in this collection are rich with place, sometimes haunting, sometimes desolate, but always sensual and full of character, struggle and love.
April 20, 2008
A book so stark it almost stifles you with its unemotional portrayal of the hidden, oft-stereotyped people of the hills in WV. Excellently written, and nuanced so that the lack of hyperbole allows you to feel the humanity of the characters without indulging in bathos.
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