Mouthquake: A Novel

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. 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, rumors, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory; it is speech therapy for the bent: the signal is purposely perverted, and the sounds thrill and beguile. Includes an afterword by Sarah Schulman.