Mouthquake: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

A dream-like coming-of-age novel about a boy with a stutter growing up in 1970s Montreal who becomes a young gay man with a stutter who uses sound to remember and understand the world around him. He decodes subliminal messages heard in record albums, finds prophecy in twisted retellings of Bible stories, and studies the speech of the famously 'disfluent' including The Grand Antonio, a strongman he befriended as a kid. This is a loudly exclaimed book of whispers, rumours, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory; it is speech therapy for the bent.

Reviews

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. It's 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

Daniel Allen Cox is a maestro of form-querying-queer. You think you have his number, you think he's in the bed beside you, but he's up, off, boldly probing. Our pleasure as readers is to keep pace with his intriguing corpus. In Mouthquake, Daniel mouths the music of memory as he dials us into the minutiae of stuttering. --Anakana Schofield, author of Malarky and Martin John

Daniel gives us not a coming-of-age but a contorting-of-age novel. Portraits of a childhood lifted by an eccentric strongman, teen years warped by post-punk and 80s pop music, and a young adulthood gorgeously twisted with queer desire. The writing is wrenchingly poetic with just the right amount of sleaze. So many unexpected moments ... like experiencing youth anew. --Amber Dawn, author of Sub Rosa and How Poetry Saved My Life

Author Bio

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 & Literary Retreat in Liznjan, Croatia.