The Book of Disbelieving - Paperback

by David Lawrence Morse (Author)

Winner of the 2022 Mary McCarthy
Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Susan Minot.

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.

Author Biography

Originally from rural south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse studied in Russia after the collapse of communism, cleaned toilets in Yosemite, and taught English then lived on a rice farm in the foothills of Yamaguchi, Japan, before eventually earning an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. His essay on the moral and political complexity of mendacity was published in The Washington Post, and his first play, Quartet, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Morse is the director of the writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale, and he lives in New Haven, CT.