{"title":"Katherine Dunn","description":"Katherine Dunn (1945-2016) 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 Toad, 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.","products":[{"product_id":"near-flesh-stories-hardcover","title":"Near Flesh: Stories - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA previously unpublished collection of stories about motherhood, violence, and desire, from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of \u003ci\u003eGeek Love\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA woman invests in a series of sex robots to get her off and comes to terms with the limitations--and real threat--of automated companionship. A knowing young student pursues an affair with an older man, the poet in residence at the university where she studies writing, and weighs the benefits and costs of their arrangement. A mother moves to a farm with her family and must come to terms with the violence simmering beneath her skin. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eNear Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e is the first and only collection of short fiction by Katherine Dunn, the author of the bestselling novel \u003ci\u003eGeek Love\u003c\/i\u003e. These nineteen stories are, like Dunn's entire body of work, attuned to the spit and grit of tough living. They pulse with yearning for a more prosperous life, for sexual satisfaction, to escape abusive husbands and the disappointments of convention. A better life, for these mostly female protagonists, seems always just out of reach. In Near Flesh, Dunn explores the struggle of women to live on their own terms, and the desire to relish--rather than squash--what distinguishes a person.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102579003615,"sku":"9780374602352","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/Gei1hNrqDI9780374602352.webp?v=1781083526"},{"product_id":"toad-paperback","title":"Toad - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman, from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of \u003ci\u003eGeek Love\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSally 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eColorful, crass, and profound, \u003ci\u003eToad\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eGeek Love\u003c\/i\u003e a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and bizarre, \u003ci\u003eToad\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written, \u003ci\u003eToad\u003c\/i\u003e is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50104762335455,"sku":"9781250872296","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/5P61bb1nV49781250872296.webp?v=1781111265"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/katherine-dunn.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}