?This is literature made from flesh, messy and bloody and exacting and haunting.?
Heather and Geoffrey ? twenty-something siblings ? become entangled in separate power struggles with a controversial professor, Dr. Barry Martin. His divisive views on masculinity have put him in the public spotlight in a way that?s created both public disgust and a private lust for proximity. As Geoffrey fumbles through grandiose academic desires, and Heather attempts to orient herself in a sea of male-inflicted indignities and conflicting impulses, the performances, and the absurdities, become unwieldy.
?Dumb-Show is Parker?s caricature of the male Academic ego where masculine fragility is peeled back to its oppressive roots against female apathy to a smorgasbord of Male Academic rituals: from aggressively boring anecdotes and criminally unfunny jokes to secondary and tertiary intellect and mansplaining par excellence. Parker?s Dumb-Show is a subversive satire of surviving Academia, and Dumb-Show is perhaps the first book that I can only describe as ?Academia Punk.? ? Khashayar Mohammadi, author of Me, You, Then Snow
?I have long admired Fawn Parker?s work. In Dumb-Show, Fawn Parker demonstrates the contradictions and complications of desire and disgust in a lustful, cynical Toronto that is both worthy of her Shakespearean inspiration and entirely her own. This is literature made from flesh, messy and bloody and exacting and haunting.? ? André Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn
?Vivid and vicious, Fawn Parker?s Dumb-Show holds nothing back in its hilarious attack on modern academia. With a sharp eye for ironic detail and striking, smooth sentences, Dumb-Show stays with you long after it?s been put down.? ? Adnan Khan, author of There Has to Be a Knife
