"I await a new book by Bart Schaneman like you wait for your favorite meal en route from the kitchen of your childhood--and goddamn this one doesn't disappoint! Part New Old West, part death-of-the-smalltown, this book is beautiful and sad and true."
- Adam Gnade, author of the Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin' Sad

"Bart's writing elbows us into the crux of immense forces pushing and pulling at a Way Of Life across rural Plains places: nuanced impacts of environmental recklessness on isolated communities, alienation of the ambitious, the American dreams celebrated in wide open vistas forever taunted by private property."
- Rich Baiocco, author of Death in a Rifle Garden

"The Silence is the Noise is like the best old country and western songs. This book belongs to America. It belongs to the hard times."
- Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, author of Cactus