Toad
Katherine Dunn, Molly Crabapple (foreword)Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.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, & 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, & 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; & Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating & sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.
Colorful, crass, & 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 & Dunn a misfit hero. Daring & bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor & her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque.
Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood & a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.
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