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by Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, and Kevin Moffett
Sometime right around now, doctors, nurses, and - most of all - parents begin to notice an epidemic spreading among children. Children who are physically normal in every way except that they do not speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. Theories spread - maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant. Maybe these children, without the ability to use or comprehend language, have special skills of their own.
Unfolding in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, impostors - everyone touched by the silent phenomenon except, of course, the children themselves - The Silent History is both a bold storytelling experiment and an unexpectedly propulsive reading experience.
Originally conceived and serially published as an award-winning iPhone/iPad app by Eli Horowitz, the former publisher of McSweeney's, along with the acclaimed novelists Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett and the intrepid coder Russell Quinn, the book has been reedited and, at times, rewritten into a definitive, nuanced, and unputdownable text, a story that is timely, timeless, and terrifying.
"Starred Review. Form follows, explores, and transforms function in this novel, originally written as an iPhone/iPad app and now being published, and holding its own, on the printed page." - Publishers Weekly
"An intriguing but less propulsive entry in an unusually robust year for linguistic thrillers." - Kirkus
This information about The Silent History was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eli Horowitz was the managing editor and then the publisher of McSweeney's for eight years. He is the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery, and Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong. He was born in Virginia and lives in San Francisco.
Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times. He lives in Massachusetts. Kevin Moffett is the author of Permanent Visitors and Further Interpretation of Real Life Events. He lives in Claremont, California.
Russell Quinn is a software developer, digital designer, and cofounder of the multinational digital agency Spoiled Milk. A native Englishman, he lives in California.
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