Twelve stories explore the borders between black and white America as they are crossed and known by students and Peace Corps volunteers of the 1960s, failed preachers, young punks, jealous lovers, and others.

Breece Pancake was a young man of lowerclass origins from West Virginia, who went to the University of Virginia to study writing. At age 27, he ended his life, leaving behind these 12 stories. They reflect the occupations and preoccupations of the people he grew up with: mining, farming, crewing a riverboat, hunting, and carousing, among others. Idiom-filled, belyingly simple (with devastating understatements), Pancake's prose is as taut and mighty...

Using the yardstick that a short story is any fiction under 15,000 words, Ishmael Reed-- with the assistance of Carla Blank-- has assembled an anthology that reexamines the history of the form across a broader, more inclusive spectrum. The result is a collection that stretches the boundaries of the American literary landscape, including work ranging from animal stories of the Northwest Coast Eyaks to African-American folklore to reflections on the...