Found Audio

by N.J. Campbell

Overview

* 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937512576
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	17 - 18 Years

About the Author

N.J. Campbell was born in the Midwest. He has won the Little Tokyo Short Story Contest, received accolades from the California State Legislature, and has been anthologized in the collection American Fiction from New Rivers Press. Found Audio is his first novel.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Amid the static of contemporary literature can be heard blips of fiction-future in N.J. Campbell’s defiantly bold Found Audio."

—Steve Erickson

“A wild, wonderful creature: part Borges, part VanderMeer, part forgotten '70s psychedelic action movie. Convincing, complex, and emotionally resonant—this is a book not to be missed.”

—Christian Kiefer

Editorial Reviews

04/10/2017
In his debut, Campbell has written a page-turner, an onion peel of a story surrounding nothing less than the central questions of human existence. The first layer is author Campbell’s claim to have come upon a manuscript. The second layer consists of documents accompanying this manuscript, written in haste by an audio analyst named Amrapali Anna Singh, who claims a man arrived in her office in Alaska, bringing with him important audio recordings from Buenos Aires, and offered her a very large amount of money to analyze them. The core of the book is Singh’s transcription of the recordings themselves, in which an intrepid unnamed journalist recounts a series of strange and dangerous journeys upon which he embarks in search of people and ideas that are greater than the sum of their parts. In the first tape the journalist describes a trip to the Louisiana bayou in search of a man named Otha Johnson, a legendary bounty hunter of snakes. In the second, the journalist travels to the walled city of Kowloon, a remote village in South Africa, and finally to the Mongolian desert in search of “the City of Dreams,” mentioned throughout history by the likes of Napoleon and Cortez. It is unclear and unsettling to both the journalist and the reader whether the journalist’s experiences are real or hallucinated. In the final tape, the journalist meets “the Turk,” a chess-playing shaman who thereafter appears in the journalist’s dreams, promising to reveal “that there may be more and less to this world than there seems to be.” The reader is led down a rabbit hole and back out again, confused, afraid, but nevertheless also ever so slightly amused. This is a weird little book full of momentum, intrigue, and weighty ideas to mull over. (July)

Publishers Weekly

*A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone

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... “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. 
Emily Bright, Minnesota Public Radio (Nov. 11, 2022)
"Ask a Bookseller: Found Audio is a creepy fall read"

"A deceptively slim book, toying with fictionality, trots the globe."
Publishers Weekly's, "Writers to Watch"

"Found Audio is a Nabokovian novel in the best possible sense of the word... an emotionally resonant literary mystery for folks who aren’t afraid to follow the rabbit down the hole."
—Jason Jefferies, Staff Pick, Quail Ridge Books (Raleigh, NC)

"In his debut, Campbell has written a page-turner, an onion peel of a story surrounding nothing less than the central questions of human existence. The reader is led down a rabbit hole and back out again, confused, afraid, but nevertheless also ever so slightly amused. This is a weird little book full of momentum, intrigue, and weighty ideas to mull over."
—Publishers Weekly

"N.J. Campbell’s Found Audio is the new Pandora’s Box of weird contemporary fiction... Like VanderMeer’s stunning trilogy [Southern Reach], Campbell captures the darkness of the unknown."
—Nick Sweeney, Heavy Feather Review

"The novel is genius... simple, spare, and amazingly effective."
—Shana Creaney, Foreword Reviews

"Found Audio by N.J. Campbell is a Russian nesting doll of a novel with layers of mystery, mythology, madness, and suspense... The novel is a brilliant work of metafiction, and the story within the story is as irresistible as gossip from a friend of a friend."
—Many Shunnarah, Pank Magazine

"A wicked metafictional mystery [and] dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Found Audio is steeped in a wonderfully creepy atmosphere that sucks the reader in and doesn't let go for the duration of the weird, dark, dreamlike ride... If you like novels that keep you glued to the pages and constantly rethinking where the story, the main character, and even reality are going next, then make sure you don't skip this one."
—Gabino Iglesias, LitReactor

"Brilliant. In an age of instant information access, Found Audio is a clever reminder that some places, experiences, and mysteries must be earned through sweat, blood, and fear."
—Adam Morgan, Electric Literature

"Amid the static of contemporary literature can be heard blips of fiction-future in N.J. Campbell’s defiantly bold Found Audio."
—Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville

"[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold."
—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune, The Ultimate Summer Reading List

"[Found Audio] stretches language, remakes structure, plots boldly, all while having its own peculiar kind of fun... catapulting us into fascinating new territory for fiction to inhabit."
—M. K. Rainey, 3:AM Magazine

"This strange little book, full of momentum, intrigue, and weighty ideas to mull over, is a bona fide literary page-turner."
—Publishers Weekly, "Best Summer Books, 2017"

"Short but powerful, the novel is filled with everything a reader yearns for. There’s action and adventure, mystery and intrigue, and even deep questions about human existence."
—Books and Palettes

"Though it deals with nothing less than the meaning of existence, the nature of reality, and ultimately, a search for the legendary “City of Dreams,” which has haunted the lives of writers and philosophers for centuries, Found Audio is also great fun... A novel that is fresh, often charming, and full of insights into the need for a City of Dreams and what these dreams represent for us all."
—Mary Whipple Reviews

"A wild, wonderful creature: part Borges, part VanderMeer, part forgotten '70s psychedelic action movie. Convincing, complex, and emotionally resonant—this is a book not to be missed.”
—Christian Kiefer, author of The Infinite Tides

Writers to Watch Fall 2017: Anticipated Debuts
—Daniel Lefferts, Publishers Weekly

"To suggest that this author's near maddening and mystic debut will "take you places" is an understatement. You may emerge from the gauntlet of its layered mysteries with a definite air of perplexity, though no more so than the narrator, an adventure journalist passionately chasing an ever elusive utopia of sorts. As his obsession with this location of wonders intensifies, so does his perception of its validity, leading him to scrutinize the very existence of everyone and everything around him. This novel meticulously shrouds its own destination in a provocative fog from the outset and, with casual finesse, pulls the reader into sharing the wonders and inevitable horrors of confronting the plasticity of reality."
—Patrick Battle, The Book Table

From the Publisher

2017-04-18
A mysterious manuscript tells the story of one man's plunge into the abyss.To quote Winston Churchill, welcome to a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Campbell offers a wicked metafictional mystery in this slim but artful debut novel. Try to follow along. In an introduction, the author says he received the mysterious manuscript, containing transcripts of three cassette tapes, in 2006. The tapes had been transcribed by Amrapali Anna Singh, a professor of archival studies in Alaska, at the request of a man named Pierre Cavey, who had very nearly circled the world to bring her the tapes, marked with the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires. Then we get to the tapes themselves, which chronicle the journey of an unnamed American journalist. The first depicts a hallucinatory voyage into the bayou on a snake-hunting expedition. The second reveals a little more. A friend of the journalist explains that his search for meaning in the world is a search for "The City of Dreams"—a myth that connects dreams to a place from various historical sources, with examples from Cortés to Dr. Livingstone's ill-fated voyage. "The point is, it's a myth—a mirage in the margins of conjecture and hearsay," the narrator is told. And indeed, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding the mysterious destination, traveling from Kowloon to Mongolia. Finally, in the third tape, the narrator travels to Istanbul to meet "The Turk," a mysterious chess champion who has more questions than answers. "You have gone around the world collecting the most odd of odd things—experiences of a fantastic order...in a swamp with an old man, in a desert filled with tents and in the belly of a fallen city," says the Turk. "Tell me, are you chasing your dreams?" Campbell's afterword offers little explanation other than his abortive attempts to find out the identity of the narrator, but the experience of reading the book remains arresting. A dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche.

Kirkus Reviews