Published books

THE QUIET REEL
Every noise is a promise.
Jana Hrubá has been capturing the world's sounds for twenty-six years: the sound of rain on rice, the rustle of wings made of leather gloves, the snap of a broken neck of a celery stalk. When an archive invites her to localize a silent film from 1927, The House Without an Echo, she does not expect anything special. Just another day's work, the woman thinks. It is only when she tracks down the footsteps in the film that someone is walking up her flat, using her gait, and limping, one room closer every evening.
The old cue sheet from the film's original presentation warns the listener not to sound the door. Never the voice. Jana has just ignored one such caution. The premiere is tonight.
Some silences were not empty. They were guarded.

The sign at the edge of Sivo Brdo reads POPULATION: 113. It's been repainted so recently the letters are still wet.
Nina Kovač, a hydro-acoustic engineer, arrives in the Slovenian Karst to find out where a river goes when it vanishes into the earth. What she finds is a village of silent watchers who stand in their doorways at her arrival, a bell that tolls at dusk, and an entire community that gathers at the old stone well to count itself, aloud, every night.
The first night Nina lowers a hydrophone into the dark. It records two overlapping heartbeats. It records a child's voice counting slowly upward: a hundred and twelve, a hundred and thirteen...
And then, a hundred and fourteen.
The last word on the recording is her name.…