
The History of Sound
Stories
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By:
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Ben Shattuck
About this listen
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE SPOTLIGHT 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. . . . A terrific writer. . . . Deeply resonant.” —The Boston Globe
“Exquisitely crafted, deeply imagined, exhilaratingly diverse, The History of Sound places Ben Shattuck firmly among the very finest of our storytellers.”
—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of Horse
“Magnificent. . . . Poignant. . . . Exquisite.” —Publishers Weekly
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.©2024 Ben Shattuck (P)2024 Penguin Audio
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tedious boring trite
- By Marc Buchalter on 11-19-21
By: Michael Christie
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Fools Crow
- By: James Welch, Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation.
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Great book
- By matt on 06-26-21
By: James Welch, and others
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Flights
- By: Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft - translator
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
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Curious and beautifully written
- By Alejandra on 10-24-18
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: David Ackroyd
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
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A beautiful story, perfectly read
- By Eugene on 01-25-17
By: Willa Cather
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The House Is on Fire
- By: Rachel Beanland
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Andi Arndt, Michael Crouch, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Richmond, Virginia 1811. It’s the height of the winter social season, the General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia’s gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the journey to the capital. On the night after Christmas, the city's only theater is packed with holiday revelers. In the middle of a performance, the theater goes up in flames. Based on the true story of Richmond’s theater fire, The House Is on Fire offers proof that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy, we are offered our most precious—and fleeting—chances at redemption.
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I learned a lot
- By Jane Perkins on 04-24-23
By: Rachel Beanland
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A December to Remember
- By: Jenny Bayliss
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Wildly different half sisters Maggie, Simone, and Star have hardly seen one another since their sprightly summers at Rowan Thorp, their eccentric father Augustus’s home. Known for his bustling approach to the knick-knack shop he ran, Augustus was loved by all and known by none, not even his daughters. Now, years later, the three estranged women are called upon for the reading of Augustus’s will and quickly realize he's orchestrated a series of hoops through which they must jump to unlock their inheritance.
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great audio
- By Morgan on 12-02-23
By: Jenny Bayliss
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All We Ever Wanted
- A Novel
- By: Emily Giffin
- Narrated by: Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Milton Bagby, Catherine Taber
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Nina Browning is living the good life after marrying into Nashville's elite. More recently, her husband made a fortune selling his tech business, and their adored son has been accepted to Princeton. Yet sometimes the middle-class small-town girl in Nina wonders if she's strayed from the person she once was. Tom Volpe is a single dad working multiple jobs while struggling to raise his headstrong daughter, Lyla. His road has been lonely, long, and hard, but he finally starts to relax after Lyla earns a scholarship to Windsor Academy, Nashville's most prestigious private school.
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Narrator choice for Tom is bizarre!
- By R. Cornelius on 06-28-18
By: Emily Giffin
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Six Walks
- In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
- By: Ben Shattuck
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
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Not good
- By LizEllen Snyder on 01-22-23
By: Ben Shattuck
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Blue Ruin
- A Novel
- By: Hari Kunzru
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent COVID case.
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An excellent dead ringer of the ridiculous depths of the art world
- By JLB on 11-15-24
By: Hari Kunzru
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We Are Not Like Them
- A Novel
- By: Christine Pride, Jo Piazza
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Shayna Small, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. As adults, they remain as close as sisters, though their lives have taken different directions. Jen married young, and after years of trying, is finally pregnant. Riley pursued her childhood dream of becoming a television journalist and is poised to become one of the first Black female anchors of the top news channel in their hometown of Philadelphia. But the deep bond they share is severely tested when Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager.
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These Author’s UNDERSTOOD the assignment!
- By Queenwdg on 10-25-21
By: Christine Pride, and others
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Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
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To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
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The Glassmaker
- A Novel
- By: Tracy Chevalier
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.
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Fascinating "time-travel" concept
- By Sollidrampen on 07-23-24
By: Tracy Chevalier
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True Biz
- A Novel
- By: Sara Novic
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan, Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges listeners into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress.
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A good story with added features both intriguing and informational
- By A Signing Mom on 05-15-22
By: Sara Novic
What listeners say about The History of Sound
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Briana R.
- 07-22-24
Gorgeous written connected stories
The environment these stories are set in, the landscapes, the sounds, the imagery are what connected most with me. The way each tale is written, and the way the stories expand on each other was really unique. I loved the audiobook, hearing Jenny Slate, Nick Offerman, Ed Helms etc. tell the stories was lovely. I devoured this book, I want the physical copy now so I can re-read and likely catch so many details I wasn’t aware of in my first time through.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Laura
- 09-04-24
Connections
I enjoyed piecing these stories together. It was a lovely quilt.
The narrators stayed in my brain for hours after I quit listening.
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- Amy Pfau
- 12-21-24
Beautiful stories.
The writing is exquisite. The narrators are wonderful actors who are a cut above the usual narration.
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- Bonnie Granek
- 02-09-25
Clever connections
Sooo well written 5 star. Reaches inside the reader like a caress. Subtle. Moody. But not always.
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- Charleen Tyson
- 11-28-24
Easter eggs
I loved the fun of finding characters woven through the stories. Beautifully written and read by these narrators.
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- jeffrey r olson
- 01-01-25
Captivating
Characters were fully fleshed out. All the short stories were complete by themselves but tied together to make a beautiful picture. The readers made the characters come alive. Loved every minute of the book.
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- Anthony Wright
- 08-21-24
Short Stories Done Right!
Shattuck did an excellent job with each short story. They are beautifully written and I love how he portrayed the complexities of life within each generation. The inter-connected story lines was genius. Highly recommend if you want a thought provoking read.
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