The Hearing Test - Eliza Barry Callahan

An artist in her late twenties awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear. She is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year - a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned - while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters - with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers - making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.