The Hearing Test

"When the narrator of The Hearing Test, 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, ... making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival"--

Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer, filmmaker, and musician from New York, NY. Her work has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Drift and elsewhere. She co-wrote the short film BUST which premiered at Sundance in 2024. She is a New York Foundation for The Arts Fellow and she teaches at Columbia University. The Hearing Test is her first novel.