Synopses & Reviews
Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of-age tale that telescopes through time like an amnesiac memoir, Mouthquake finds its strange beat in subliminal messages hidden in skipping records, in the stutters of celebrities, and in the wisdom of The Grand Antonio, a suspicious mystic who helps the narrator unlock the secret to his speech. This is a loudly exclaimed book of innuendo, rumours, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory that asks: How do you handle a troubling past event that behaves like a barely audible whisper?
Written with a poetic bravado and in a structure that mimics a stutter, the elegiac Mouthquake is speech therapy for the bent: the signal is perverted and the sounds are thrilling.
Includes an afterword by Sarah Schulman, author of Rat Bohemia and The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.
Daniel Allen Cox is the author of Shuck, Krakow Melt (both Lambda Award finalists), and Basement of Wolves. He also co-wrote Bruce LaBruce's film Gerontophilia, released in the US in 2015.
Review
"Art both tells and transforms life. And it is through the juxtaposition of evocative, surprising language with intellectual awareness and the sharing of open consciousness that this process is conveyed with soul as long as the form emerges from the emotional center of the work. Daniel finds these connections and innovations within himself, partially through commitment, partially through instinct. Its that thing we call talent combined with the hard work of honest feeling, the self-reflection that reveals new selves when a person finally stops defending and decides to understand." Sarah Schulman, author of
The Child and
Rat Bohemia, from the Afterword
Synopsis
A dream-like novel about a woolly mammoth, a mysterious man named the Grand Antonio, and a boy with a stutter.
Synopsis
A dream-like coming-of-age novel about a boy with a stutter who becomes a young gay man who uses sound to remember. There are subliminal messages in K-Tel records, a woolly mammoth down the street, and the Grand Antonio, the suspicious strongman the boy befriends. This is a loudly exclaimed book of whispers, rumors, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory.
Synopsis
A novel about a boy with a stutter, and the suspicion of sexual abuse and repressed memories.
Synopsis
A dreamlike coming-of-age novel about a boy with a stutter who becomes a young gay man who uses sound to remember. From subliminal messages in ABBA records, to a woolly mammoth down the street, to a character named the Grand Antonio, the suspicious strongman the boy befriends, this is a loudly exclaimed book of whispers, rumors, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory. Includes an afterword by Sarah Schulman.
Daniel Allen Cox is the author of Shuck, Krakow Melt (both Lambda Award finalists), and Basement of Wolves. He also co-wrote Bruce LaBruce's film Gerontophilia, released in the US in 2015.
About the Author
Daniel Allen Cox: Daniel Allen Cox is the author of the novels
Shuck, Krakow Melt, and
Basement of Wolves, all published by Arsenal Pulp Press. He is the co-screenwriter of the 2014 Bruce LaBruce film
Gerontophilia. Daniel is a 2015 writer-in-residence at the ZVONA i NARI Library and Literary Retreat in Ližnjan, Croatia.