Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE BOOK OF DISBELIEVING

David Lawrence Morse

Stories

The nine stories in The Book of Disbelieving open portals to fabulist worlds and magical objects.

The nine stories in The Book of Disbelieving open portals to fabulist worlds and magical objects: a village built on the back of a whale, a holiday that requires literal leaps of faith, a tower that houses an entire civilization, a diary that blurs the line between imagination and memory. The worlds Morse creates are fantastical, but the challenges his characters face are grounded in reality, calling into question issues of love, memory, and the subjectivity of experience.
Steeped in the existential crises of our era, The Book of Disbelieving is a wondrous collection of fables and lore.

David Lawrence Morse studied in Russia after the fall of Communism and taught English and lived on a rice farm in Japan before eventually earning his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. He is now the director of the writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, and elsewhere.

Available products
Book Published 2023-07-18 by Sarabande
Book Published 2023-07-18 by Sarabande

Comments

THE BOOK OF DISBELIEVING is the Winner of the 2022 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction! And a 2023 One Story Literary Debutante selection

Provocative tales bound to raise questions about the reader's own assumptions.

In the shiver-inducing tradition of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, and Margaret Atwood, David Lawrence Morse paints a vivid portrait of life in a universe eerily similar to our own. Intellectually provocative yet also deeply moving, these exquisitely written stories remind us of the comfort to be found in ritual and convention, along with the terror and joy to be found in freedom.

Set amid dreamscapes and dystopic worlds sometimes only at a slight angle to our own, David Lawrence Morse's The Book of Disbelieving explores grief, wonder, courage, (dis)belief, and the obligations we have to ourselves, our communities, and beyond. These stunningly inventive stories are filled with fascinating characters who confront the responsibilities of knowledge and change, mythos and desire, power and social order, and the day-to-day commitments of just moving through their worlds. Charming and mysterious, unsettling and moving, and always deeply alive, The Book of Disbelieving is an inspired collection of unique depth.

This is an astonishing debut. David Lawrence Morse has crafted nine short stories that share a wild inventiveness and sparkling ingenuity that will make believers of all who read The Book of Disbelieving. From 'The Great Fish,' the first of his fictions, to 'The Serial Endpointing of Daniel Wheal,' we're in the presence of a writer who's that rare thing: original.

What a marvel The Book of Disbelieving is! Here are cities filled with midwives and ferrymen for the dead, and mysterious, prophetic journals of the recently deceased. It is a collection of love, of parenthood, and of our collective fears and dreams, set in worlds where the outskirts of cities still hold memories of unicorns and minotaurs, and families lash their homes to the backs of enormous whales. A brilliant and fabulous book of magical tales.

The stories in David Lawrence Morse's The Book of Disbelieving are located somewhere between what used to be called 'the real world' and the world of fables, mirror-realities, and dreams. This book carefully and patiently takes you into Wonderland, where nothing is quite what it seems. Reader, be prepared for a mind-bending journey to places you have never been before.

David Lawrence Morse takes feathers from the caps of some of the great fabulists - Jorges Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez all peek behind the curtain - and adds his own sly humor... Morse is a writer of imagination and whimsy.

The Book of Disbelieving is filled with beauteous, beguiling wonders - giants of the deep, towers that stretch to infinity - but the most affecting magic here is profoundly human: the unknowability of others (and of ourselves); the mysteries of love and loss. Morse conjures the fantastic with such gorgeous, vivid precision we yearn for it to be real, much as his characters yearn to believe in each other.

With its light touch, The Book of Disbelieving skillfully tracks how a change in worldview - subtle or bold - recreates the ways we look at society and one another. There's wild imagination here in the service of investigating relationships of all kinds - and each story reverberates beautifully into the next.