Sound Museum

About

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.

Praise

“To read Sound Museum is to watch The Zone of Interest fall into gentle banter with Tár 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-Román, author of Alternative Set of Procedures