SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING PAUL MESCAL AND JOSH O’CONNOR Winner of the Story
Prize Spotlight Award • Shortlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain Award • Longlisted for the PEN
Faulkner Award for Fiction & the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction An ALA
Notable Book • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” • One of the Chicago Tribune ’s 10 Best Books of
2024 • Best Short Fiction Kirkus Reviews “Polyphonic fiction. . . . A reminder of the
short story’s power. . . . The History of Sound marks Shattuck as one of the form’s brightest
lights.” —The Boston Globe A stunning collection of interconnected stories set in New
England exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history family heartache and
desire can echo over centuries In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries The
History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are
entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection each story
has a companion story which contains a revelation about the previous paired story. Mysteries
and murders are revealed history is refracted and deep emotional connections are woven
through characters and families. The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who
meet around a piano in a smoky dim bar only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods
collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War forever marked by the odyssey.
Decades later in another story a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful
summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive exquisite stories
transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and
beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories artifacts paintings
and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches forests and
orchards revealing the secrets misunderstandings and love that linger across centuries.
Written with breathtaking humanity and humor The History of Sound is a love letter to New
England a radiant conversation between past and present and a moving meditation on the
abiding search for home.
