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9781680034004 Academic Inspection Copy

The Silent :CHord

A Novel
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A bleak and humorous literary novel about a scientist with synesthesia who invents an artificial fragrance to reproduce the silence of the smell of his dead mother. When Denise, his coworker, unwittingly inhales the fragrance, she must fight to stop a flood of hallucinatory artificial memories that threaten to destroy her identity. The novel explores a sad future (or the worst version of our present) in which human experience is mediated almost entirely through photographs and a few individuals who fight to live in the real.
Matthew Kirkpatrick is the author of The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art (Acre) and Light Without Heat (FC2). He is a professor at Eastern Michigan University.
"Matthew Kirkpatrick's thrilling The Silent Chord reads something like Kafka writing a Charles Yu story: bleakly hilarious, offering an inescapable claustrophobia of office politics and corporate disaffection, all the while remaining highly attuned to the ways we fail to see each other even as we yearn for connection. A dizzyingly disorienting novel I won't soon forget, from a writer who never fails to surprise and delight." --Matt Bell, author of Appleseed--Matt Bell "Part satire and part noir, The Silent Chord is a mash-up of Hitchcock's Psycho and David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. Kirkpatrick's razor-sharp humor and brilliantly executed plot is a synesthetic pleasure in the vein of Paul Auster and Tom McCarthy. But more than that, this is a novel of ideas: about the sanctity of memory, the slippery line between possibility and fantasy, and the threat of literal and figurative erasure. A bold and original novel, The Silent Chord is a deft reminder of the frailty of human consciousness when faced with grief, the brutality of corporate corruption, and the lengths we go to in order to combat perhaps that most haunting of human emotions: loneliness." --Lindsey Drager, author of The Avian Hourglass--Lindsey Drager
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