The History of Sound: Stories

Shattuck follows his memoir, Six Walks, with a magnificent collection about love, longing, and New England history. In the title story, set in 1919 rural Maine, college students Lionel and David become lovers while spending the summer collecting folk songs on wax cylinders. “Origin Stories,” set in 1983, revisits Lionel and David’s story when a professor’s wife sees an interview with Lionel on TV and later discovers the cylinders hidden in the old house she and her husband recently moved into. Glimmers of the past confront the protagonist of “Graft” during her visit to Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1893, where she sees a boy she thinks might be the baby she left to be raised by her sister-in-law. Shattuck shines especially in his depiction of nature, as in “The Journal of Thomas Thurber,” which recounts daily life at a logging camp in the winter of 1907–1908, where every man died under mysterious circumstances; and in “The Auk,” a poignant narrative that explains the existence of a 1991 photo of a long-extinct sea bird and reveals the story of the photographer, a man struggling to connect with his wife after she’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Deeply felt and impeccably researched, these exquisite stories capture the spirit of the Northeast. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (July)