The Hearing TestThe 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 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 neighbors, 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 that marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent."--Dust jacket.