Sound Museum
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Coffee House Press
Published:5th Dec '24
Should be back in stock very soon
A combination of fiction and documentation, Sound Museum fearlessly interrogates state-sanctioned violence and the psychology—and banality—of evil.
In Iran, a curator has gathered foreign journalists for a VIP tour of her latest creation. As the guests sit to listen to her initial remarks, she shares the struggles she's faced in bringing together this exhibition—especially the gender inequity she's battled for her entire career.
But the Sound Museum is no ordinary institution. It is a museum of torture, wrought from the audio recordings pulled from interrogation rooms and prison cells. And the curator—her unbroken monologue drifting through fieldwork examples, case studies, archives, philosophy, and dreams—is only too happy to share her part in this globe-spanning industry.
With sensuous and lyrical prose, Sound Museum bears witness while calling into question the act of witnessing, underlining complicities in systems of power and drawing the reader into the uncomfortable position of confronting one woman’s psyche: evil, yet completely blind to her own depravity.
Praise for Sound Museum
A Ms. Magazine Favorite Book of 2024 “As much as readers might squirm as the narrator uses works opposed to torture to justify torture, the overall effect is one of a horror in which everyone is complicit. A taut, searing tour of modern atrocities.” Kirkus, starred review
“Unflinching and unsettling, this book speaks to bystander culture, witnessing, violence and power.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Missaghi toes the line between dark humor and horror in this transfixing story about a museum of torture in Iran. This is as smart as it is uncompromising.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Sound Museum espouses] dark curiosity about the human desire to command and violate bodies.” —Isabella Zhou Foreword Reviews
“Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but . . . it’s well worth the effort.” —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
“With a masterful command of language, missaghi offers a clear-eyed view of the fictions which present violence as an immutable accepted fact. Far from a comforting work, Sound Museum invites us to ask if our way of life is worth the cost.” —Alexander Pyles, US Catholic
“Reading poupeh missaghi’s courageous Sound Museum is an astonishing experience of profound significance. It is magnificent.”—Rikki Ducornet, author of The Plotinus
“Immersive, propulsive, and thoroughly unsettling. To read this chilling novella is to sit across from your complicity as the weak tea of lean-in feminism and institutional DEI is spilled slowly down your shirt.” —Anna Moschovakis, author of An Earthquake is A Shaking of the Surface of the Earth
"In a furious mixtape of feminist theory and scholarship on torture, missaghi constructs a universe beyond clearly recognizable sides of good and evil. Sound Museum turns the mirror back toward its readers, who, unbeknownst to themselves, have entered the Sound Museum and may never leave again." —Yanara Friedland, author of Groundswell
"Ignoring the rules of political correctness, poupeh missaghi confronts horror and violence in a direct way, generating an uncomfortable but necessary book that stands in the middle of the unacceptable to intelligently question the forms that atrocity takes and the double standard and Western hypocrisy towards these practices."—Carlos Soto-Román, author of Alternative Set of Procedures
ISBN: 9781566896993
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
152 pages