“There are moments of acute emotional violence, as. Toad, like Dunn herself, is defiantly, triumphantly, its own thing.' Dunn never lets us get comfortable: Just when the lyrical sentences begin to soar, she yanks up the mellifluous prose and thuds down squat subject-verb-object clunkers. ' anger is raw, bitterly comic and frequently startling.' If Toad is indeed the last word we get from the late great author, thank the literary gods she didn’t go quietly.” We need more women like Sally in the world, and more writers like Dunn to tell their stories. 'Now, in a year marked by renewed repression and the ominous rolling back of fundamental rights, her anger feels like a warm embrace.

Terry Nguyen, Los Angeles Review of Books Toad a generous inquiry into what makes life worth living.'

'Dunn’s writing is dynamic and propulsive. For all its sly humor and cool detachment, Toad is a deeply melancholy story, not an elegy for lost youth, but an exorcism.' It is exhilarating, often disturbing, and as compelling in its way as Dunn’s best-known work. Dunn’s style is unlike that of anyone living or dead: simultaneously practical and bonkers lovely and nasty.” “If Geek Love was a misfit anthem, Toad is a misfit ballad. Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction. Daring and bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. It is filled with the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Self-deprecating and sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.Ĭolorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn’s ode to her time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. There was Sam, an unabashed collector of other people’s stories Carlotta, a troubled free spirit and Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.

A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman, from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love.

Katherine dunn new book