Set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, this is the story of two children--Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance--who grow up with their mother and aunt while their soldier-father fights for his life during the chaotic early months of the Korean War.

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital's entrance by a war veteran who...

Kate--whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage--must in a single year come to terms with the pairing of radiant beginnings and profound loss.

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...