Toad by Katherine Dunn

A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred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 .
Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at
home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the
floors. 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
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 amonga group of eccentric,
privileged young people at a liberal arts college. There was Sam, an
unabashed collector of other people's stories; Carlotta, a troubled free spirit;
and Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating and
sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them
apart.
Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn's ode to her time as a
student at Reed College in the late 1960s. 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. Daring and bizarre, Toad
demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the
grotesque. 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.
If Geek Love was a misfit anthem, Toad is a misfit (...)

Katherine Dunn is the author of Geek Love, which was a finalist for the
National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, as well as the novelsAttic
and Truck . She was an award-winning boxing journalist whose work
appeared in Esquire, KO Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy,
The Ring, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue . Her writing on boxing is collected in
One Ring Circus . In 2004, Dunn and the photographer Jim Lommasson won
the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for their work on the bookShadow
Boxers . Dunn died in 2016.

Picador
On Sale: Oct 31/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 352 pages
Frontispiece photograph
9781250872296 • $24.00 • pb
Fiction / Literary