After a few years living in cities, Ethan Thomas returns to his rural Nebraska hometown and takes a reporting job at the community newspaper. He stumbles upon a big story when an out-of-state oil company pumps enough fracking wastewater into the ground to induce earthquakes. As Ethan learns to write he reconnects with a young woman from his childhood. This is a story about the complicated relationship we have with the places we know best, the pull of the outside world, and finding something to love.

"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

Bart Schaneman lives in Denver, Colorado where he works as a business reporter covering the cannabis industry. He was raised on a farm in Nebraska, has worked as a journalist for 15 years, and lived in Asia for five. He is the author of the novel The Green and the Gold, the travelogue Trans-Siberian and the collection of essays Someplace Else: On Wanderlust, Expatriate Life, and the Call of the Wild.

ISBN: 978-0-9992499-6-3

Pages: 154

Publication: 2018