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“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.”

—Peter Ho Davies, author of the Man Booker Prize-longlisted book The Welsh Girl

 “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.”

—Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

“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.”

—Charles Baxter, author of The Sun Collective

“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.”

—Natalie Bakopoulos, author of Scorpionfish

“What a marvel The Book of Disbelieving is! Here are cities filled with midwives and ferrymen for the dead, finishing schools for wife-auctions, 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.”

—Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World

“In these riveting fables, Morse writes with lyrical beauty and biting humor to explore the precarious existence of individuals in societies driven by convention and delusion. Morse’s extraordinary feats of imagination illuminate predicaments close to home: you will find yourself thinking about these stories for years to come.”

—Edward Dusinberre, author of Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home

“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.”

—Nicholas Delbanco, author of It Is Enough

“The 21st-century fables in David Lawrence Morse’s exquisite collection, The Book of Disbelieving, are finely wrought timepieces that contain within their works much strangeness and mystery.  Each one lingers in the mind like a dream you can’t quite shake after waking.”

—Donovan Hohn, author of The Inner Coast

“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.”

—Eileen Pollack, author of Breaking and Entering