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3.5 

Toad

By Katherine Dunn & Molly Crabapple
Toad by Katherine Dunn & Molly Crabapple digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman, from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love.

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.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 among a 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.

89 Reviews

3.5
““But I love myself now better than anyone else ever could. My foibles amuse me, my stupidities are endearing to me, the overriding innocence and zeal of my crudest actions make them lovable. I am a dear and a darling, and it is quite unfair that there is no one to appreciate the full scope of my loveliness.” a previously unpublished novel from a portland icon!!!”
“I had a HARD time with that one”
Surprised Face with Open Mouth“Toad is painfully human and unquestionably other in equal measure. There is a casual strangeness that feels like home. With no especially lovable characters, I was still fascinated by them and desperately wanted to know where life would lead them. The mundane surreality to all of the events that transpire in Toad brought with it a rising sense of foreboding as I progressed through the pages that was absolutely merited. I was a little afraid at the outset that Geek Love was on too high of a pedestal for me, and anything else would pale in comparison. I was not wrong exactly. The two works can't really be compared. Toad is a wholly different creature.”

About Katherine Dunn

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 novels Attic 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 book Shadow Boxers. Dunn died in 2016.

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