Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox, Sarah Schulman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551526041
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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 & Literary Retreat in Ližnjan, Croatia.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher