Sound Museum Poupeh Missaghi 9781566896993

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.

poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, and translator (between English and Persian). Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 (Coffee House Press). Her translations include I'll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi (Astra House, 2021) and In the Streets of Tehran by Nila (Ithaka Press, 2023), as well as forthcoming Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). She is currently an assistant professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, and a faculty mentor at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, OR.

Praise for Sound Museum

"To read Sound Museum is to watch The Zone of Interest fall into gentle banter with Tar on an elevator, bringing us so close to the mouth of evil that we can feel her breath. I left this book so unsure how to define character or cruelty, I could barely remember how to walk across the room." -Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Borealis

"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-Roman, author of Alternative Set of Procedures

Past Praise:

Praise for trans(re)lating house one

Library Journal, "Best Debut Novels Fall/Winter 2019"
The Millions, "Most Anticipated 2020"

"trans(re)lating house one is an experimental hybrid work that combines a traditional novel narrative with quotes from theorists and writers, dossier-style notes on people who have been made to disappear after death, and poetry. The unnamed protagonist's journey through Tehran-its teahouses, gardens of private homes, and streets-takes the reader along on her quest." -Ploughshares

"Missaghi, a writer, translator, editor and teacher, uses a fragmented style, veering from journalism to magical realism, to tell a fragmented story that produces no answers, only questions: 'Will the trauma ever stop being inherited? Will humans ever change?'" - The Millions

"A haunting political cartography, trans(re)lating house one is an evocative hybrid novel about the struggle to map the scars of our dead and disappeared." -Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Call Me Zebra

"trans(re)lating house one resonates with recent masterworks about disappearance, such as Sara Uribe's Antigona Gonzalez or Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light, where the search to find the disappeared becomes inseparable from how we understand the hemisphere, the nation, and even the universe itself. This is a rare and remarkable book." -Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human