My latest book, Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History, is out in the US. It will be out in the UK in October. I also have copies of it in my house.
The overview and description on the website and elsewhere is one that my editor at OUP considered best at least partly for ensuring that the book comes up on searches. I appreciate all their valuable work on it and it covers important aspects of the book, but I thought I'd make available here the brief outline I provided when I submitted my full manuscript (rather long ago, and now slightly edited), which tries to explain the book in terms of ‘sound writing’:
"Oral history has a long-standing, closely entwined relationship with writing. Tracing that history, Sound Writing considers the interplay between sound recordings and written literature. It observes how written texts can be read sonorously, but it goes further to explore a dream of sound writing itself, enabling voices to reach readers directly, cutting out the need for authorial mediation. Oral histories are nevertheless actively mediated, often turned into and received as written texts, by authors and by readers. This book considers how oral history can inform our understandings of authorship and reading, to reconceive and query their potential as active, collective, and activist. Finally, it reflects on the role and responsibilities of authorship in the academy."
This mediation of the book itself - here and elsewhere - entails distortion and loss as well as gain--Sound Writing has more to say about sound writing and much else so please order it for your libraries! (I may reflect further on this book in blog post form in coming weeks.)