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. "[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold."
-Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
"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 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.
