Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Sometimes things aren’t linked; they’re just there together, occupying the same space. And we do violence to them when we try to break them up and force them into a line or a sequence.”

T.M. Wolf annotates an excerpt of his novel, Sound, explaining how it is modeled on hip-hop beats. At RapGenius.

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As seen on T.M. Wolf’s Facebook page, the UK edition of Sound. You can see the full US cover art on T.M. Wolf’s Tumblr… or tantalize yourself with the spine, as featured in NYT’s ”Bookshelf”:

NYT Bookshelf

“The formalist games continue with Sound (Faber & Faber, $18), by the hip-hop fanatic and Yale Law School grad T. M. Wolf, who also has degrees in intellectual history and urban planning. His dizzying interests somehow coalesce in this first novel, with the prose arranged here and there on horizontal lines, like musical notation.”

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tmwolf:

Part of Sound after it was chopped-up with an APC-20 sampler and arranged in Ableton Live. To hear the results, check out FSG’s Tumblr.

The literary novel in 2012.

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T.M. Wolf’s SOUND is unusual because of its polyphonic approach to narrative, manifest on the page like bars from a music score. Wolf has said he’s inspired by hip-hop and its formal approaches. Here he attempts to approximate what reading from his novel might sound like.

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tmwolf:

“You make a new style. That’s what life on the street is all about. What’s at stake is honor and position on the street. That’s what makes it so important, that’s what makes it feel so good—that pressure on you to be the best. Or to try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with.”

- Fab 5 Freddy, with words to write by

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tmwolf:

The United States cover for Sound, courtesy of Jeff Clark/Quemadura.

(We’re publishing it in April.)

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“The form has its obvious limits—and others I’m sure I don’t understand right now—but it’s helped me get closer to things I like to see fiction do and would like to see fiction do more of: delve into the nitty-gritty of how we put thoughts together; square up to the fact that we frequently think multiple, contradictory things at once; capture more of the liveliness and volume of life; build out the expressive potential of form. Plus, I’m obsessed with music, so anything that helps draw music and writing together is something I’m down for.”

-T. M. Wolf on the writing and page layout for his novel Sound

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“While I was working on “Sound,” I envisioned it as a kind of hip-hop novel. I say “hip-hop” not in the sense that the book was going to try to translate stories from hip-hop songs into fiction, or that it was going to present a story through rhyme, but rather that it was going to take its formal cues from hip-hop compositional approaches: I wanted the book to have layers; I wanted those layers to be bassed-up, to have a lot activity beneath the vocal surface that would punch through that surface; I wanted to mix harmony and dissonance; I wanted it to have flow; and I wanted it to loop, basically taking earlier parts of itself, remixing them, and spitting them out again.”

T. M. Wolf on his novel Sound

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Sometimes things aren’t linked; they’re just there together, occupying the same space. And we do violence to them when we try to break them up and force them into a line or a sequence.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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