Audio Series: Artificial Wilderness

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


In light of all the social distancing and recommended reduction to group events, we're happy to help support those who have recently published, or will soon be publishing, a book. It's hard enough to get your books out there, and now with the cancelation of book events and readings making it even harder, I want to do my part to help you spread the word!


Today, Mandy-Suzanne Wong seized the opportunity and is reading an excerpt from her latest, a non fiction chapbook Artificial Wilderness, which published with Selcouth Station in March 2020. It was a winner of Selcouth Station’s Environmental Chapbook Competition. 

Her internationally acclaimed debut novel, Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House), was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, American Book Fest’s Best Book Award, the Eyelands Book Award, and the Permafrost Book Prize as well as a Conium Review Book Prize semifinalist, a Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award shortlistee, a Leapfrog Fiction Contest honorable mention, and a PEN Open Book Award nominee. She is also the author of the essay collection Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space (McMaster); the fiction chapbook Awabi (Digging), winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award; and the essay collection Listen, we all bleed (New Rivers, 2021), a finalist for the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize. Her work appears in Entropy, Waccamaw, The Spectacle, The Island Review, Quail Bell, The Deck Hand, Black Warrior Review, Permafrost, her monthly column at Manqué, and several other venues.

Click on the soundcloud bar below to listen to Mandy-Suzanne Wong read an excerpt from Artificial Wilderness:







What it's about: 

Artificial Wilderness is a book about the act of listening. Do you listen? Do you really? Have you ever let the sounds around you - the nonhuman sounds; the unwanted sounds - interrupt your private telenova? Referencing the work of sound artists dave phillips, Cathy Lane, Chris DeLaurenti and more, Mandy-Suzanne Wong implores us to listen. With illustrations from multidisciplinary artist and eco-feminist activist Kathryn Eddy, Artificial Wilderness is the perfect interruption to daily life.