A combination of fiction and documentation, Sound Museum fearlessly interrogates state-sanctioned violence and the psychology--and banality--of evil.

In Iran, a curator has gathered foreign journalists for a VIP tour of her latest creation. As the guests sit to listen to her initial remarks, she shares the struggles she's faced in bringing together this exhibition--especially the gender inequity she's battled for her entire career.

But the Sound Museum is no ordinary institution. It is a museum of torture, wrought from the audio recordings pulled from interrogation rooms and prison cells. And the curator--her unbroken monologue drifting through fieldwork examples, case studies, archives, philosophy, and dreams--is only too happy to share her part in this globe-spanning industry.

With sensuous and lyrical prose, Sound Museum bears witness while calling into question the act of witnessing, underlining complicities in systems of power and drawing the reader into the uncomfortable position of confronting one woman's psyche: evil, yet completely blind to her own depravity.

In the aftermath of Iran's 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran's public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city's points of connection--teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars--her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language?

Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.