ANN PANCAKE reads from her short story collection ME AND MY DADDY LISTEN TO BOB MARLEY

Skylight Books Podcast Series

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories (Counterpoint)

Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connected to their land--sometimes through love, sometimes through hate--and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. Retired strip miners find themselves victimized by the industry that supported them; a family breaks down along generation lines over a fracking lease; children transcend addict parents and adult suicide; an urban woman must confront her skepticism about worlds behind this one when she finds bones through a mysterious force she can't name.

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley explores poverty, class, environmental breakdown and social collapse while also affirming the world's sacredness. Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect is both pitch-perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her firsthand knowledge of her rural place and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families may remind one of Alice Munro.

Praise for Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley

"[P]owerful, sure-footed and haunting..."--The New York Times

"Pancake's novel is shockingly pure, like holding gold in your hands, or wheat--all the chaff winnowed away." --Orion Magazine

"Lush descriptions of the landscape are matched with a hurtling stream-of-consciousness narration to great effect: one doubts neither the characters' voices nor their places in a very complex poverty." --Publishers Weekly

Ann Pancake’s most recent book is Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (Counterpoint 2015). Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Counterpoint), was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (University Press of New England) won the Bakeless award, and she has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.