Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, The Telegraph, & Chicago Review of Books
Nylon, A Must-Read Book of the Month
Bookshop, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
Goodreads, A Most Anticipated Debut
The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"Over the course of a year in New York City, an artist goes deaf. She records her life as her hearing slips away, reflecting on silence, art, and record-keeping itself in this meditative novel." —The New York Times Book Review
"This engrossing, eccentric novel ties together our ideas about time and sensation, revealing how illness alters both. Then it untangles that knot and weaves a linguistic fabric unlike any you’re likely to have felt before." —Emmeline Clein, The Atlantic
"Excellent . . . In this ambitious yet compact book, we continue to occupy the slippery ground between mimesis and anti-mimesis—the place where life imitates art and vice versa." —Kate Simpson, The Telegraph
"[The Hearing Test] has a loosely structured feel, often to delightful effect. There are numerous brilliant scenes of the narrator navigating her new life." —John Self, The Guardian
"[The Hearing Test] made me look differently at what we call the mundane and ordinary and all that slips through to be lost when we mark it as unimportant . . . Callahan's debut is refreshing and recommended for anyone navigating their own period of crisis and feeling unmoored." —Aliza Rahman, The Daily Star
"A novel by turns wry and revelatory and taut . . . Replete with crystalline heightened moments." —Lou Ann Walker, The East Hampton Star
"In a way that echoes [Rachel] Cusk’s writing, Eliza’s descriptions and judgments about her surroundings throw her inner life into relief: they seem designed to direct attention to how her mind moves. Callahan also shares Cusk’s flair for seeding strange and piquant details into the speech of her narrator’s interlocutors . . . Heartbreak and hearing loss are either symbols for each other or paired expressions of something deeper: a fundamental out-of-tune-ness that is beguilingly present in Callahan’s style . . . [B]reathtakingly crafted." —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"A pitch-shifting, wry-humored novel . . . Callahan’s cool, all-encompassing prose brings comparisons to Clarice Lispector and Fleur Jaeggy. It's a work that lets you in on the frequencies of life we often tune out or obscure from sight." —Anna Cafolla, A Vogue Best Book of the Year
"Both meditative and deliciously funny . . . masterfully-observed." —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
"Pitch-perfect . . . Callahan handles humor with a lightness of touch, both in form (at 176 pages, the book is slight) and sensibility (the prose is enviably precise), that good comic timing has. Think of Charlie Chaplin walking off into the distance, brokenhearted and twirling his cane . . . Callahan creates something bigger than a simple story of individual trauma—by relinquishing an easy sense of exceptionalism, Callahan achieves something here that you might call grace." —Hannah Regel, Jacobin
"[A] brilliant autofictional debut . . . Callahan’s philosophical prose, reminiscent of Fleur Jaeggy and Clarice Lispector, exhibits a quality of attention increasingly rare in our screen-addled era." —Mia Levitan, The Times Literary Supplement
"The Hearing Test unfolds with the ease of a diary but has, on second and third readings, an artful shape. It is separated into four movements like a symphony, full of loops, repetitions, and motifs, yet at just over 150 pages it is a very short and very quiet symphony." —Joanna Biggs, The New York Review of Books
"The Hearing Test attempts to describe an experience for which it is difficult to find the words, sometimes literally . . . The result is successful and refreshing. At a time when isolation, illness, and difference are ever more present in the collective consciousness, we need narratives like this to set a precedent of literary attention and care." —Madeleine Wulfahrt, Cleveland Review of Books
"An original, extraordinarily vivid book that is as much about life, chance and falling out of love, as it is about sickness, The Hearing Test is an invigorating study of the beauty and possibilities of language and representation." —Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine
"Callahan uses the narrator’s sudden deafness—and the questions that abound from such a radical transformation in how she engages with the sensory world—to claw at the underbelly of experience, to investigate conscious life at the most basic of units . . . There’s consistent humor, little bursts of observational wit . . . [and] transcendentally lucid prose." —Stuart Beal, Columbia Spectator
"In dreamlike, state-of-consciousness free-flowing prose, Eliza Barry Callahan’s debut novel is unpredictable, warm, and artistic." —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag
"Terrifying though it may be to have to realign your perception of life once you’re losing control of one of the main ways you experience it, it can also be liberating. And, for that matter, mundane. Callahan captures all of these elements in this beautifully discursive novel, that traces the experiences of her autofictional alter ego as she navigates what it might mean to live a life that’s muted in one way, but amplified in so many others." —Kristin Iversen, Just Circling Back
"The Hearing Test is a gift. It touches on many forms of art—visual art, dance, music, literature—and those who create it. It explores the ways in which relationships—parental, romantic, sexual, platonic—change according to time and circumstances. And it traces how sometimes not having all the answers can lead to journeys of greater understanding, by way of some surprising meanderings." —Norah Piehl, Bookreporter
"Callahan debuts a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates . . . A bracing immersion into the world of the senses." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] quietly electrifying debut . . . This is a special novel with a style reminiscent of Magda Szabó’s The Door and whose commitment to making sense of everyday existence calls to mind Tom McCarthy’s Remainder." —Booklist (starred review)
"[W]hirling perambulations between memory, present-day interactions, and reflections on the historic creates the sense that this is not solely another navel-gazing missive but rather a woman asserting that there is value and artistry to be found in a thoroughly examined life . . . Callahan’s deft hand, bobbing and weaving down these many avenues of thought, suggests a promising confidence from a writer just getting started." —Nina Moses, The Rumpus
"A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch." —Kirkus Reviews
"Not for a while have I read a book by a writer new to me, and felt so much toward it so fast. The Hearing Test takes up fragility, sound and silence, solitude, the unknown, and the self in relation to others with a light, yet serious touch. I've found a new favorite." —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy
"Eerie and tender and utterly consuming, The Hearing Test has built an entirely new world from the materials of the one we know. It takes you to a restaurant called the void, Il Vuoto, and serves you its primal, beguiling sustenance: a nourishment of pauses, estrangement, and bewilderment. The voice here is wise and wry and wondering; in its fresh and faltering silences are frequencies I’ve never heard before. From the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to keep reading Eliza Barry Callahan forever." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams
★ 01/29/2024
Callahan debuts with a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates. The unnamed narrator wakes one August morning to a droning in her right ear that causes everything to sound distorted. After a hearing test, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness and referred to a series of specialists. The narrator’s diaristic account of more tests, hypnotherapy, clinical trials, and her declining hearing over the ensuing months is shaped by her various relationships and changing circumstances. In October, she receives a visit from her unnamed ex-boyfriend, who wants to say goodbye to the dog they once shared before he moves to Los Angeles. In November, she calls a friend of her mother’s who’s dying from cancer and tells the friend it’s “terrible she would die at ,” to which the friend jokingly replies she’d “rather die than go deaf.” The narrator finds solace on hearing loss forums, where many people report hearing the same “phantom songs” (“Amazing Grace,” “Silent Night,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”), and ruminates in beautiful prose on the idea of silence (“Being in the presence of things made me more aware of the way I was experiencing their absence—everything existed in a silhouette”). It adds up to a bracing immersion into the world of the senses. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc. (Mar.)
2023-12-06
A year in the life of a young New Yorker who has a condition that causes progressive deafness.
As this work of philosophical fiction opens, it’s August 29, 2019, and the narrator is about to fly to Venice to attend a friend’s wedding. But, she says, “When I awoke that morning, I felt a deep drone in my right ear accompanied by a sound I can best compare to a large piece of sheet metal being rocked, a perpetually rolling thunder.” Doctors are consulted, the trip is canceled, courses of treatment are begun. The novel then proceeds by recounting the narrator’s experiences and observations over the next 12 months. Though there’s no plot to speak of, Callahan’s debut features a number of interesting characters—an ex-boyfriend who’s a filmmaker in L.A. and his current girlfriend as well as the narrator’s mother, landlord, neighbors, and small black dog. Constantly interrogating her condition, she often refers to other artists, writers, composers, and works of art, finding unusual connections among them. A visit to an audiologist named Robert Walther leads to the thought that “days before, in bed, I had been reading a book titled A Little Ramble written by a group of visual artists in response to the work of Robert Walser, a writer whom artists always embarrassingly seem to think belongs to them like a secret.” The audiologist goes on to administer a hearing test that’s recorded like a list poem: “Say the word wince. / Wince. / Say the word want. / Want. / Say the word war. / War.” And so on. A sentence that appears near the end reflecting on the narrator’s experiences of the preceding year seems to apply just as much to the experience of the person reading the text that recounts them. “I was thinking that if you think about something long enough, it will make sense even if you haven’t made any sense of it at all—you’ve just gotten used to it.” The impression of a sly, subtle joke shared between reader and author is a frequent treat of Callahan’s prose style.
A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch.
