Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski: Sorcerer

Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.

Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.