Found Audio, N.J. Campbell
Found Audio, N.J. Campbell
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Found Audio

Author: N.J. Campbell

Narrator: Joel Simler, Sharmila Devar, Will Tulin

Unabridged: 4 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/13/2023


Synopsis

For the first time ever, Found Audio presents a complete transcription of the unsettling audio recordings of a mysterious unnamed adventure journalist and his decades-long pursuit of the Borgesian "City of Dreams," alongside analysis from audio expert, Amrapali Anna Singh* A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone
"[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold."—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.
On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?
Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.
Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David on October 19, 2017

​Admittedly, I'm way behind on writing reviews...but this book just didn't really stay with me. I was captivated by the style more than anything. It had a unique formal opening (an epistle written by an academic). And then thereafter became the transcript of an audio recording that the academic had......more

Goodreads review by Blair on August 21, 2022

If you love meta novels about lost media – and I do, though I acknowledge it’s a bit of a niche – this is a must-read. I’d describe it as The Witnesses Are Gone meets The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, with a detour via We Eat Our Own. It’s about a mysterious set of tapes, transcribed by a......more

Oh my goodness, this was such a fun read. I really can't help but love stories within stories. So basically, a mysterious man approaches an audio analyst with some tapes. He gives her a huge amount of money to transcribe them and learn what she can from them. She is explicitly told not to share this......more

Goodreads review by Stacia on March 10, 2022

From Plato to Calderón, Calvino to Borges, writers have often questioned the line of where realities & dreams cross, coexist, or even switch places. I was completely sucked into this slightly enigmatic & compelling tale -- a modern entry of the fantastic prodding the boundaries of age-old philosophi......more

Goodreads review by Mattia on August 08, 2017

Video review: [URL not allowed] House of Leaves sans the fear and quirks, via Lovecraft's dreamiest tales. On paper, it's perfect, and in fact there's lots to love here; some features of the novel (most notably the whole this-is-not-fiction effect) are a bit wobbly, but it's fa......more