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The Deposition
Juniper Prize for Fiction
by Pete Duval
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
216 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.70 in
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An insurance lawyer driving across Iowa engages a wounded, hitchhiking priest in a metaphysical debate. A vacationing air traffic controller with a penchant for Saint Francis of Assisi is bitten by an ancient parrot. The Marxist owner of a Florida curiosity shop confronts a local church community's rising anger over a jarred fetus, while a fasting husband of an evangelical minister holds bloody communion with the leader of a suburban coyote pack and a Catholic cable news cameraman tracks a missing stigmatist through a Caribbean port city. As cosmic struggles play out against the backdrop of forgotten strip malls, suburban cul-de-sacs, and grimy cities, guidance comes from the unlikeliest of sources. In prose both dreamlike and vivid, the characters in Pete Duval's second collection navigate paths through a landscape of vestigial faith and nagging doubt.
PETE DUVAL is author of the short-story collection Rear View, which won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize and the Connecticut Book Award. The recipient of two Connecticut artist grants and fellowships from the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Duval is associate professor of English at West Chester University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ascent, the Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, Chelsea, Exquisite Corpse, and Appalachian Heritage, among other venues.
"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
