The Deposition

"Duval’s persistent subject is the distance between his characters and a state of grace. There is a visceral appreciation of anticipation, which is one of the reasons I love this book.. . . For the depth of the questions it asks, and the joyful somersaults it affords, The Deposition is a necessary book."—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Duval’s collection of short stories, The Deposition, is full of mysteries and oddities that enhance his writing and illustrate his great gifts as a storyteller . . . He creates stories that get at the heart of the maddening uncertainty of human life.”—Colorado Review

"The Deposition is a handful of luminous and hard-hitting short fiction, a collection replete with images and sentences that linger like unhealed wounds in the reader’s memory."—The Massachusetts Review

"The Deposition occupies the space between dreaming and waking, the known and the unknown, the sacred and profane in prose which feels at once from another time, and timeless. You may not know precisely where you are in some of these stories, though you will almost certainly be struck by the unnerving feeling you have absolutely been there."—Sam Michel, author of Strange Cowboy: Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

"The book in your hands is holy writ, a collection of stories as searching, heartbroken, and beautiful as the work of its spiritual and intellectual forebears, not just Andre Dubus and Flannery O'Connor, but Melville and Hawthorne. This is not a work of escapism; this is a work of wisdom, situated at the very heart of the peculiar brokenness of being alive in the twenty-first century."—Mark Powell, author of Firebird and Small Treasons

"The Robert Stone and Graham Greene quotes are no window dressing. Pete Duval's unlikely postulants are lonely seekers in a world that's turned strange and uncertain and possibly Godless. As one notes, 'Either the author of the universe was watching him right now—or not.' The Deposition shines with all the wonder and terror of the miraculous."—Stewart O'Nan, author of Henry, Himself and A Prayer for the Dying