A book that we are very proud to have recently indexed at Southwest Humanities, Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Far Calls: On Omens, Slips, and Epiphanies (Zone Books/Princeton University Press, 2025) is now available for purchase! In Far Calls, Heller-Roazen embarks on a captivating journey through the realm of “overhearing”—those fragile moments when speech slips, sounds echo in unintended ways, or meaning emerges through fragments rather than full statements. He traces this phenomenon through a rich tapestry of historically varied examples: the oracular rituals of ancient Greeks, Jews, and Romans; Augustine’s serendipitous acquisition of a salvific fragment of speech; the psychoanalytic interpretations of Freud and Lacan; and the literary echoes heard by modernists like Breton, Yeats, Proust, and Joyce. Across these stories, Heller-Roazen reconstructs the subtle “arts of detection” by which whispers, mishearings, and serendipitous utterances become sites of insight, revelation, or artistic inspiration. Far Calls invites us to reconsider the margins of speech and sound—not as noise or error, but as thresholds of meaning. It is a compelling, conceptually rich volume for anyone interested in the poetic, psychoanalytic, and philosophical dimensions of language’s unknowable fringes. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 