Dumb-Show

  • ISBN-13: 9781927886564
  • PRICE: $22.00
  • Paperback, 288 pages

“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

Fawn Parker

Fawn Parker is a Fredericton-based writer and the author of six books including What We Both Know, nominated for the 2022 Giller Prize, and Hi, It's Me, nominated for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writer's Trust Award. Her poetry collection Soft Inheritance won the 2023 JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the 2023 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Fawn is the 2025 Poet Laureate of Fredericton and a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick.