The Silence is the Noise
By Bart Schaneman
Published by Trident Press, 2018
154 pages, paperback
After a few years living in cities, Ethan Thomas returns to his rural Nebraska hometown and takes a reporting job at the community newspaper. He stumbles upon a big story when an out-of-state oil company pumps enough fracking wastewater into the ground to induce earthquakes. As Ethan learns to write he reconnects with a young woman from his childhood. This is a story about the complicated relationship we have with the places we know best, the pull of the outside world, and finding something to love.
Praise for The Silence is the Noise
"I await a new book by Bart Schaneman like you wait for your favorite meal en route from the kitchen of your childhood--and goddamn this one doesn't disappoint! Part New Old West, part death-of-the-smalltown, this book is beautiful and sad and true." - Adam Gnade, author of the Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin' Sad
"Bart's writing elbows us into the crux of immense forces pushing and pulling at a Way Of Life across rural Plains places: nuanced impacts of environmental recklessness on isolated communities, alienation of the ambitious, the American dreams celebrated in wide open vistas forever taunted by private property." - Rich Baiocco, author of Death in a Rifle Garden
"The Silence is the Noise is like the best old country and western songs. This book belongs to America. It belongs to the hard times." - Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, author of Cactus
