Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award (2003) Winner of the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Fiction (2000) 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.