"The stories, often experimental, share in common not so much their plots or structures but recurring motifs: the transformation of humans into birds, an angry mother dying of cancer, the messy details of bodily existence. Often, the stories have more than one teller, inviting the reader to hold two separate perspectives on a series of events simultaneously. Morgan's stories may not be for the squeamish or the easily baffled, but open-minded readers ready for a challenge will delight in discovering the many sides of her mysterious heroine."
—Kirkus Reviews
“In The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman, Courtney E. Morgan has designed a map of the female body and a psychosexual journey. Weaving her way through different storytelling modes, including fairy tale and horror, fiction and nonfiction, literal and lyric, these creepy but also vital stories create, decreate, and recreate the skins we live in: language and the body. Breathtakingly.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
“Courtney Morgan's dark and surprising stories turn sharp corners. You read and discover that the passage between life and death is the threshold you already crossed. This work is no less potent for all its refractions. The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman is the prism that splits, briefly, the body and the corpse. Morgan is a writer whose sentences produce what they describe: the disorderly sensation of a threatening desire.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan, Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith, and A Compendium of Domestic Incidents
“The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman is disarming and smart and spooky. I’ve never read anything quite like it.”
—Noy Holland, author of Bird and Swim for the Little One First
