Isaac Yuen

YouTube video by Wellington Square Bookshop Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen - The Sound Atlas

@michaelavieser.bsky.social and I had such a lovely chat with Sam Hankin, owner of the Wellington Square Bookshop and host of The Avid Reader. You can watch and listen to our conversation about The Sound Atlas below!

The last frontier of empathy: why we still struggle to see ourselves as animals | Megan Mayhew Bergman Champions of exceptionalism say humans hold a unique moral status. Yet there’s only one species recklessly destroying the planet it needs to survive

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

"What would it mean to build, farm and move across the planet with kinship, not conquest, as our organizing principle? What would a different world – one that works with nature, and not against it – look like?"

I'll try to finish the book by the time we meet!

Rhythm by Isaac Yuen | Beyond thought.

"Virginia Woolf believed that style in writing all comes down to rhythm, that once you find it, there are no wrong words."

#shortreads #creativenonfiction #flashprose #onwriting

Your monthly reminder:

Keep writing. When no one cares, persist. When things appear to be crumbling, keep at it. When it's difficult, push through. When you feel alone, listen to the stories in your blood. Just write. The world needs your stories.

The writer's ritual: @michaelavieser.bsky.social unboxes our author copies of The Sound Atlas, in full hardcover glory!

Out now in the UK via @reaktionbooks.bsky.social and in Nov via @uchicagopress.bsky.social

#soundstories #deeplistening #armchairtraveler

How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents What do you do when you’re about to publish your debut novel and you discover another book—released eighteen months earlier—with the same title and a strikingly similar cover? And that its plot, to…

lithub.com/how-one-snai...

"What do you do when you’re about to publish your debut novel and you discover another book—released eighteen months earlier—with the same title and a strikingly similar cover? And that its plot, too, features a last-of-its-kind snail?"

Thanks to Dr. Miranda Melcher for chatting with us about The Sound Atlas!

Listen here: newbooksnetwork.com/the-sound-at... or wherever you get your podcast!

Thanks to @seventydys.bsky.social for picking up our odd little book that took us on such unexpected adventures! 🙏🔊👂

Happy for the honourable mention for my Italo Calvino inspired short story titled "Tales from Coral Country"! 🪸🪸🪸

"...In our modern-day, faster-paced world, the hub for aeolian sounds seems centered around San Francisco...On a breezy day on a south side hilltop, a 28-meter high sound sculpture designed by Lucia and Aristides Demetrios rings through its arched and rusted beams..."

#aeolianharp #soundstories

A 28 metre-high steel wind harp in San Francisco designed by Lucia and Aristides Demetrios (DougK at waymarking.com)

Next stop in The Sound Atlas: San Francisco, with detours in Baden-Baden, Germany, the Aeolian Islands, Sicily, and Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts—all in an attempt to trace the history of the Aeolian harp, an ancient instrument that is played solely by the wind...

An excerpt:
"No need to visit the now national historical landmark in New Jersey to pick up the oldest sound of all. Simply tune in to an empty channel on any radio or old analogue television – amidst the static, a residual trace from the birth of the universe..."

#soundstories #deeplistening

A black and white image of the Holmdel Horn Antennae in New Jersey.

The first chapter & stop of The Sound Atlas is, believe it or not, New Jersey.

There, in 1964, at the Holmdel Horn Antennae, began the saga of two radio astronomers accidentally tuning into a background radiation that originated from the Big Bang, changing the science of cosmology forever...

A blurb by Japanese photojournalist Kyoichi Tsuzuki for the Sound Atlas, a new essay collection by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen: "I've always thought that music has nurtured me more than literature or art, but I never realized that there was such a rich soundscape outside of music! This book taught me that to 'see' sound is to touch life."

Thanks to Kyoichi Tsuzuki, renowned photojournalist and author of TOYKO STYLE & ROADSIDE JAPAN, for this heartfelt blurb for THE SOUND ATLAS, coming out next week!

Preorder your copy here: shorturl.at/kKNn3
#soundscape #soundstories #newbook
@michaelavieser.bsky.social
@reaktionbooks.bsky.social

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is coming round again and the shortlist is stunning.

See the whole shortlist here: www.rmg.co.uk/whats-... and there will be an exhibition of all of them at Royal Museums Greenwich after the winner is announced.

Destabilize the system, cultivate your humanity, eschew narrow definitions of efficiency. Roam in a wildflower meadow for no reason. Give gifts with no expectation. Write an imperfect paragraph that no one else, let alone the grand fascimile machines, could write.

Thanks so much Constance! Hope you enjoy it!

A 25% off of preorder for The Sound Atlas by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen at Waterstones bookstores. Offer code is SUMMER25 until July 31.

UK friends and readers, you can get 25% off the preorder of THE SOUND ATLAS at @waterstones.bsky.social using the code SUMMER25. Offer is exclusive to the Waterstones website & app and ends on 7/31:

Link at www.waterstones.com/book/the-sou...

@reaktionbooks.bsky.social #WPreorder #soundatlas 🌏👂🎶

“No Future” Lexicon: The Post-Post-Apocalyptic - Public Books But what lies beyond the end of the world? Casting off the trappings accreted by the post-apocalyptic genre emerge stories of the post-post-apocalyptic.

"Offering distance and difference in vantage, the post-post-apocalyptic allows the imaginary lens to recenter its focus on a freed moment in time, along with its sovereign, mutable future.”

A new essay up at @publicbooks.bsky.social for a new series edited by @mw-m.bsky.social: shorturl.at/WdMDg

“No Future”: A Lexicon If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?

Anxiety about the future is nothing new. As @mw-m.bsky.social writes, “Rejecting future’s seeming inevitability has defined thought and practice around the world, likely for the whole of human history.”

Our new series “No Future”: A Lexicon, begins today:

Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic “There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”

“I wanted to reposition a place that is so often seen as a periphery. For people living in the Arctic, these are their homelands, so of course for them the region is the center of the world, in the sense that it’s the place where your imagination operates from.”

A white mug with the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction logo holds a spray of lavender next to a stack of the eight books shortlisted for this year's prize: North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins The City in Glass by Nghi Vo Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera The West Passage by Jared Pechaček Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson

We're thrilled to present the shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction:

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Blaze Island by Catherine Bush

A Bestiary of Loss To mark Lost Species Day, images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories — from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker.

For #WorldEnvironmentDay today, “A Bestiary of Loss” — images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories, from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker: publicdomainreview.org/collection/e...

Sometimes a Rose Is Just a Rose A conversation about gardening, loss, and the end of metaphor

“I’ve been on this crusade against metaphor for years,” Yiyun Li tells Manjula Martin in this conversation. “I think metaphors are not helpful when you are writing about things that are very hard to tackle.”

For garden lovers, metaphor haters, and those learning to accept grief.

How These Fish Lost Their Memory The unexpected consequences of harvesting old, wise fish

In Norway, herrings are losing their elders and their knowledge of migration routes. The solution? Change harvesting practices to encourage a population boom and help the fish recover their collective memory.

What We’re Playing in 2025 - Orion Magazine Games featuring the magic of mushrooms

I share a memory from the cult-classic Earthbound as a videogame that showcases the magic of mushrooms in the latest issue of @orionmagazine.bsky.social #mushrooms #fungi

A list of songbirds on the Merlin bird ID app.

Always nice to have a full list of birdcalls in Merlin within a minute. 🐦

A short review of a rich and fascinating new book from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social by @ekostories.bsky.social and Michaela Vieser