The Big Book of Sounds and Other Stories

“Jon Steinhagen’s The Big Book of Sounds captures the rhythm of everyday life at its most sinister, deftly leading us into a world that is simultaneously familiar and unsettling. In twenty-two flawless tales, most escapades in form as well as substance, Steinhagen creates a haunting world that is vivid and true and categorically unique. Imagine the spare, sharp prose of Sherwood Anderson layered with Shirley Jackson’s eerie genius….and you have maybe an inkling of the adventure in store for you. The Big Book of Sounds is a work of towering imagination, a collection of carefully burnished gems not to be missed.”

–Jacob M. Appel, author of Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets

There is always a need for a special machine.” So says The Big Book of Sounds and Other Stories by Jon Steinhagen. In an age of snipe hunts, shell games, and offer after offer that’s too good to be true (or too bad to pass up), this book is just such a singularly necessary machine. Alternately channeling notable idiosyncratists from the last century (Beckett, Barthelme) and from this one (Miranda July, Jonathan Safran Foer), Steinhagen’s stories are replete with missing persons and murderously empty voices at the end of the line. Here, tours of nothing are cheap but not free, and you can buy vintage wind, from a catalog, because air is not nothing, especially when it moves. In this wonderfully strange and (yes) unmistakably moving new collection, Steinhagen is trying to sell you on the idea that even nothing is not nothing. Buy it, I say. Hook, line, and sinker. “Why should I?” you say. Because it says right here: the guy meant every single, soulful word.

–TJ Beitelman, author of John the Revelator

The Big Book of Sounds and Other Stories is populated by amateur con artists and performers– people both tragic and funny who have become so good at staging their inner lives that the line between artificial and genuine is no longer perceptible. Their search for meaning in this world of uncertainty provides the context for stories of magical invention, where characters buy vintage wind, create nations out of baseball teams, play interchangeable parts in romantic webs, or endeavor to catalog every sound a human can make. Jon Steinhagen’s masterful way with voice reveals how people use language itself to both mask and unmask human emotion, asking readers to question how well we, too, really know our own hearts.

–Kelly Magee, co-author of With Animal