“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