Good news, Geek Love fans: Farrar, Straus and Giroux is planning to publish two new books by the late Katherine Dunn.
Publishers Marketplace reports that FSG’s MCD imprint will release Toad this fall. The book will follow “a woman who has retreated into a life of isolation following a breakdown reflects on her time as an impoverished college student in the early 1970s in Portland, Oregon, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, and the group of wealthy trust fund kids she befriends.”
In 2022, MCD will publish a collection of stories by Dunn, as yet untitled.
Dunn, who died in 2016, is a cult-favorite author, best known for Geek Love, her 1989 novel about a bizarre family that owns a traveling carnival. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book an “audaciously conceived, sometimes shocking tale of love and hubris in a carnival family exerts the same mesmeric fascination as the freaks it depicts.”
Dunn’s last book, On Cussing, was published last March by Tin House Books.
She published rarely after Geek Love, to the consternation of her fans. At various points over the years, she said that she was working on a boxing-themed novel titled Cut Man, but the book never materialized.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
