Bend an Ear: Three Bits of a Book

Books are for reading. But sometimes books can be for listening, an odd form of reading that is almost like synesthesia. What does a circle taste like? What is the smell of blue? Spoken language is not at all the same thing as written language. When you listen to a book, squiggly abstract symbols do not crawl from the page into your ear cavities, yet you are triggered to imagine the scenes described by those symbols. Some sort of alchemy has transformed the squiggly abstract symbols into soundwaves, peaks and valleys, shapes of moving air. The human voice… it’s the original form that stories took, before the squiggly abstract symbols were even invented.

But I digress. Or…can it be a digression if it happens before the primary topic has even been introduced?

Start again. 

My second novel, A Book with No Author, came out at the end of 2023. Its convoluted story is not easy to synopsize, nor to capture in brief samples. It asks: What would you do if private details from your life were made public and you can’t find the person responsible? Or, to go a bit deeper: Is there an Author of this story?

On the exploratory journey into those questions, several people’s lives are disrupted and profoundly changed—and that includes not only the characters inside the metafictional frame of a “book within the book” but also the people in the “real world” outside that frame.

Author VN Alexander in the Dactyl Review says:

“In this paradoxically-entitled novel, Robison brings together all his many selves, layered like an onion, Russian doll, and Escher drawing at once. The selves are set against each other, not just as fictions, but as real men, jealous of each other, sometimes getting into little fights. These are tropes about the artistic process itself. Twinning is a form of art: the hero and his foil, the plot and the subplot reflect and refract each other. Here the reflection is so kaleidoscopic it dazzles.”

But I crafted the book to make it more than a kaleidoscopic puzzle. The puzzle pieces are made up of stories of regular people, their lives, their difficulties. Family, love, divorce, livelihood, religion, addiction, obsession… struggles with which most readers can identify and sympathize.

Artist and writer Deirdre Day says: 

“Intellectually ambitious but tenderly invested in characters linked by their curiously shared stories, Robison questions authorship itself without sacrificing the authenticity of storytelling.”

Below are three excerpts featured on The Strange Recital podcast. In each, you can hear me read from the novel, then have a conversation with my co-host Tom about the book and the excerpt. Interesting ideas are raised! Each episode is roughly a half-hour long.

I hope you’ll bend an ear, lend an ear (don’t send an ear) to the soundwaves of human voices translating arcane alphabetical markings into images, ideas, and emotions inside your body/mind. Thanks for reading listening!

From January 2024, an excerpt from very near the beginning of the novel:

From August 2024, a flashback to the beginning of all that came later:

From May 2025, a standalone story that reveals the protagonist's history:

For more information about A Book with No Author, please visit the Recital Publishing website.