Featured Reviews

Dumb-Show

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I have long admired Fawn Parker’s work. In Dumb-Show, 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

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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 perhaps the first book that I can only describe as "Academia Punk."

 —Khashayar Mohammadi, author of Me, You, Then Snow

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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

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Set-Point

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"Fawn Parker's recent novel, Set-Point blew me away. Parker's sensibility is contemporary, smart and funny; fans of auto-fiction by international writers like Ben Lerner or Elif Batuman will love her" — Joan Thomas, winner of the 2019 Governor General's Award for Fiction for Five Wives

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"Parker’s talent makes writing a novel look easy – Lucy’s daily drags around Montreal are an elaborate, entertaining, ironic simulation on par with Seingård or the sexual labour she’s selling – but Set-Point aspires to more than effortless neutrality. In risking sentiment, it succeeds."

— Paige Cooper, Author of Zolitude

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Set-Point is a novel about nothing. Or, not nothing, but certainly emptiness: the emptiness of virtual realities; of endless parody; of cartoon porn; of a purged stomach or a missing body part. Here, in Fawn Parker’s savagely ‘chill’ Montreal, student art, friendship, therapy, work, and relationships are cast as light as dust — a discordant counterpoint to Lucy’s fierce internal world of self-loathing, ego, and worry over her mother’s illness. It will make you feel like your old self again. Neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It’s a pleasure.

— Spencer Gordon, author of Cruise Missile Liberals and Cosmo

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True to her name, Lucy Frank shines a beam of lucidity on impossible beauty standards, Sisyphean dead-end jobs, tepid hookups, and noncommittal on-off relationships with friends and erotic partners. When her worlds collide and collapse, she seeks to escape, as if in a fairy-tale turned nightmare, from her own digital “breadcrumb trail.” To anomie and alienation reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh, candour that rivals Sally Rooney, and an explicitness suggestive of early Mary Gaitskill, Fawn Parker adds her own antic, absurdist, utterly distinctive sensibility. Set-Point takes us to the very edge of identity, virtual and lived.

— Kateri Lanthier, author of Reporting from Night and Siren

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Looking Good and Having a Good Time

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“Parker’s writing is characterized by a very dry brand of humour that takes you by surprise. Looking Good and Having a Good Time is an energetic read.”

– Broken Pencil

“Parker makes fun of her generation, and of contemporary literature. Magical realism has arrived in millennial Montreal.”

– Montreal Review of Books