Sound Museum

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 wander her museum's halls, she shares the struggles she's faced in bringing together this exhibition of her profession—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 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, drawing the reader into the uncomfortable position of confronting one woman’s psyche; evil, yet completely blind to her own depravity.

Publication date: October 22, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 4.5 x 7

Page count: 136 pages

ISBN: 9781566896993

poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, translator (between English and Persian) and educator. Her books include Sound Museum (2024) and trans(re)lating house one (2020), both with Coffee House Press. Her translations include Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), In the Streets of Tehran by Nila (Bonnier Books, 2023), and I’ll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi (Astra House, 2021). 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, Portland, OR.

A Ms. Magazine Favorite Book of 2024

“As much as readers might squirm as the narrator uses works opposed to torture to justify torture, the overall effect is one of a horror in which everyone is complicit. A taut, searing tour of modern atrocities.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“Unflinching and unsettling, this book speaks to bystander culture, witnessing, violence and power.”

—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Sound Museum is a ruthless record scratch on human rights abuses, compressed into hybrid novella. [Missaghi] offers a chilling depiction of one woman’s ability to spin a please-pick-me-dictator career into sinister self-actualization.”

—Erin Vachon, The Rumpus 

“Missaghi toes the line between dark humor and horror in this transfixing story about a museum of torture in Iran. This is as smart as it is uncompromising.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[Sound Museum espouses] dark curiosity about the human desire to command and violate bodies.”

—Isabella Zhou, Foreword Reviews

“Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but . . . it’s well worth the effort.”

—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“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