"Breathtakingly crafted [...] Callahan’s synesthetic language troubles the distinctions between senses"

"★★★★★ - Psychological ekphrasis."

“Both meditative and deliciously funny . . . masterfully-observed.”

“This is a deeply moving meditation on life and loss—a stunning debut.”

“Pitch-perfect . . . Callahan achieves something here that you might call grace.”

“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.”

“A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch.”

“[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.”

A young woman’s sudden hearing loss initiates and propels The Hearing Test. But affliction is also a catalyst for the many irresistible twists and digressions that make this novel of dérive so compelling. Callahan never explains; with steely reserve she observes and chronicles, makes ingenious, delirious connections and transitions, and takes us on a journey through her cultural mindscape of artists, writers, cinema and music, and offers it up with muted irony and a limpid grace. Her characters are not just the anointed; The Hearing Test is full of verbatim conversation with neighbors, family and strangers, that reads like poetry. The novel has a fly-on-the-wall quality of noting, listing, transcribing -- and finally containment, of making narrative out of life’s accidents. The Hearing Test is ecstatic prose. I finished Callahan’s novel and went right back to page one, my habit now with the books I love.

An artist suffering from sudden hearing loss finds herself even more sensitive to the lives of others, observing neighbors and the absurdities of the city, always punctuated by art and literary gossip. This debut work by Eliza Callahan is an extraordinary piece of literature, to be read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza.

“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.”

In this striking novel, ‘controlled panic’ gives way to a cool remove when a young artist suddenly goes deaf. Silence, for her, ‘is dressed as an injury,’ but it is also the point of entry into the lives of other creators, and philosophers. Elegant and startling, The Hearing Test is a contemplative gem.

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.