Ask a Bookseller: "Found Audio" is a creepy fall read
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Danni Green of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY loves to read and lift up books by small presses. She’s a big fan of the printed novella “Found Audio,” which sounds very fitting for our radio-based book series. N. J. Campbell is the book’s author, and it was published by Two Dollar Radio, a small press in Ohio.
The story opens with Amrapali Anna Singh, a historian and audiologist, who receives a mysterious visitor to her Alaskan office. The man hands her three cassette tapes and asks her to determine all she can from the audio over the next 24 hours, without making copies of the tapes. But Singh does make a copy of the tapes and her analysis, which she sends to a friend in case something should happen to her. She is never seen again.
The interior chapters of the novella — this book weighs in around 170 pages — contain the transcript of these curious tapes. In each, an adventurous journalist describes his search for the sublime as he visits three sites that by all accounts don’t exist.
“I think it’s really great for people who like things like “House of Leaves,”” says Green. “It’s kind of a novel-within-a-novel… that’s telling you about this bizarre thing. Did it happen? Did it not happen?”
Green recommends this book for people who want a creepy, but not terrifying, read.
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