The History of Sound: Stories - Softcover

Shattuck, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593490401 ISBN 13: 9780593490402

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING PAUL MESCAL AND JOSH O’CONNOR

Winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award • Winner of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Shattuck

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The History of Sound

I was seventeen when I met David, back in 1916. Now I don’t very much care to count my age. It’s April 1984 here in Cam­bridge. White puff balls that must be some sort of seedpod have been floating by the window above my writing desk for days now, collecting on the sidewalk like first snow.

My doctor suggested I write this story down, due to the recent sleeplessness that started when a package from a stranger arrived at my house: a box of twenty- five wax phonograph cylinders, sent from Brunswick, Maine. A letter taped to the box read, I saw you on television. I admire your work. These are yours. I found them when cleaning out the house we bought. Of the three books I’ve written on American folk music—with moderate success and thus the tele­vision interviews—I’ve never written about that summer with David. So, here we are.


I first saw him in the fall, after my first term at the New England Conservatory, when I was out with my friends in the pub. He was across the room, at the piano. I remember watching how his shirt stretched and slacked across his back.

“What do you think?” my friend Sam asked, tapping me on the arm.

I hadn’t heard his question.

“What are you looking at?” he said, turning.

“I know that song,” I said. It was “A Dead Winter’s Night,” a tune my father used to play on the fiddle back in Kentucky. A slow song to the tempo of “a sitting person’s breath,” as he’d say. An old English ballad from the Lake District, I’ve since researched, about a man and a woman lost in the woods, having run from their homes to elope. Thinking of it now reminds me of lying on the porch in the summer, moths flitting around the lantern, my father’s foot hitting the floor—the scratch of his boot on the wood. Katydids in the trees, stitching the night together. My brother sitting nearby.

“Excuse me,” I said to Sam.

I pushed through the crowd, to the piano. I watched David play. His eyes were closed, so at first he didn’t notice me standing there. Cigarette held between his lips. Dark hair combed back. His head jolted when the chorus arrived. I watched his hands.

“Where did you learn that?” I asked when he ended.

“Oh,” he said, looking up. “Some swamp in Kentucky.” He ashed his cigarette on the floor. A deep voice. Words spoken too fast. He played a C chord with one hand and picked up his drink from the floor with the other.

“I’m from Kentucky,” I told him. His hand paused on the keys. He looked up again.

“Yes, well. Sorry.” He held out his hand. “David.”

“Lionel,” I said.

“What department?”

Likely everyone in the pub that night was from the Conser­vatory.

“Voice,” I said.

“Well, fa-la-la. I’m composition. This”—he played the melody once—“a hobby. In the summer. To get fresh air. Song collecting.”

From across the room, my friends motioned that they were leaving. I waved them on.

“Ever been to Harrow?” I said. “That’s where I grew up.”

“Harrow. Two summers ago. Sky-blue gazebo in the center of town.”

He seemed unsurprised by the coincidence, so I, likewise, didn’t react. There weren’t many Southerners at the Conservatory then, and absolutely nobody from Harrow, a town of two thousand be­tween the rivers Cold and Solemn. (I’d come to Boston because the school’s music teacher noticed my voice. She wrote to a friend in Lexington, who’d attended the Conservatory, who then vis­ited Harrow and consequently organized my scholarship.) But here was David, having passed through my town on one of his collecting trips. Perhaps we’d even seen each other. I was once homesick, I remember.

“There was a reel I remember learning there,” he said. “‘Maids of Killary,’ I think?”

“I know it. Do you know ‘Seed of the Plough’?”

“Should I?” he said.

I told him that my mother used to sing it.

“Go on. Let’s hear it.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“What key?” he said, playing one chord to the next, down the piano. He edged forward on the bench. “What key?” he repeated, touching out an A.

His eyebrows lifted. I noticed then a dash on his upper lip, a scar, a smudge of pale red that I’d later learn was from his father.

“Don’t think you could put a piano to it,” I said.

“The floor is yours.” He pushed away from the keys, slipped another cigarette from his pocket, picked a candle from the head­board, and cupped the flame to his face. Waited.

I was told I had perfect pitch when I named the note my mother coughed every morning. I could harmonize with a dog barking across the field. I was the tuner for my father’s violin—standing at his elbow, singing out an A while he pinched and tightened the pegs. Early on I thought that everyone could see sound. A shape and color—a wobbly circle, blackberry purple, for D. I only ad­justed the shape I saw, and then locked into the correct decibels. Tastes started to accompany the notes when I was thirteen. My father would play a bad B minor and waxy bitterness filled my mouth. On the other hand, a perfect C and I tasted sugary cher­ries. D, milk.

I sang for David then.

I’ve always felt as if what came from my throat and lips was not mine, like I was stealing rather than producing something. This body was mine— he constriction of my diaphragm, the pressure in my throat, the lips and the softening of my tongue that shaped the sound—but what left me, ringing through the crown of my head so my skull felt more bell than corporeal, flooding my ears’ timpani, vibrating through my nose, wasn’t my own. More like the sound of wind over a bottle. Or, better, an echo of my own voice, coming from my mouth. A repetition. I can’t sing like that anymore—and I miss it. Now I have this weak warble, this drone that nobody tells me isn’t any good.

As I ended the song, the color yellow faded to the taste of wet wood.

“Where in hell did you learn that?” David asked.

I shrugged.

“I wouldn’t be puttering around school if I had a voice like that,” he said.

When he stood to get another beer, I saw he was inches taller than anybody in the room.

We stayed together until dawn. Me singing to his piano.

I might have been able to hum a D at both octaves, but I’d never met anyone with a memory like his. I’d later learn he had maybe a thousand songs in his head, and could hear a melody only once to repeat it, note for note. That night, tilting his head, plug­ging an ear with a finger, humming a note or two to tease out the song, he only fumbled a line when he was absolutely drunk.

“Let me buy you another beer,” I said, not moving from the piano’s side, the gray morning light filling the dusty windows of the pub.

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve kept me up all night. You owe me.”

“Anything you want,” I said, staring.

“No. I’m tired. It’s morning. I’m going to bed. I live across the street. Walk me back.”

His apartment was bare—only a bed, a piano, and a chair. Dirty plates and glasses were scattered on the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593490401
• ISBN 13: 9780593490402
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland