The History of Sound Stories

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

Some books you read. Others you inhabit. Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound is the latter—a collection so luminous and intricately woven, you’ll find yourself returning to its pages like an old photograph you can’t quite let go of.

Set across three centuries of New England landscapes—from the salt-worn shores of Nantucket to the pine-thick woods of Maine—these twelve interconnected stories explore how the past never quite stays buried. Each tale has a companion piece, and together they reveal secrets, solve mysteries, and illuminate the unexpected ways love and loss echo across generations. At the heart of the collection is the haunting title story: two men meet at a piano in a smoky bar and spend a summer recording folk songs on wax cylinders in the shadow of World War I. Decades later, a woman discovers those very recordings while cleaning out her new Maine home, and the past comes flooding back.

Now a major motion picture starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, this ALA Notable Book has earned widespread acclaim, named one of NPR’s “Books We Love” and the Chicago Tribune‘s Best Books of 2024. The Boston Globe calls it “polyphonic fiction” and a reminder of the short story’s power, while Geraldine Brooks praises Shattuck as “among the very finest of our storytellers.”

Perfect for readers who savor literary fiction, LGBTQ+ narratives, and stories rooted in the coastal beauty of Maine.

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