Katherine Dunn – författare

A National Book Award Finalist: This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias have bred their own exhibit of human oddities. (The New York Times Book Review)The Binewskis arex a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan, Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins, albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious - and dangerous - asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the US, inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.Praise for Geek Love'If Flannery O'Connor had consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this' Literary Review 'The most romantic novel about love and family I have read. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal' Terry Gilliam 'I felt electrocuted when I read that first page with Crystal Lil and her freak brood. I stood there in the bookstore and my jaw came unhinged. No book I've read, before or since, has given me that specific jolt' Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

In this thrilling and utterly unique work of narrative non-fiction, Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of the GPS satellite system – in a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets This is the story of the Global Positioning System, the network of U.S. government satellites that encircle the earth: a vast web that, in a matter of decades, has transformed the way we understand space and time, making us critically dependent on vulnerable technology we often forget is even there.It is a system that was conceived of as a military product designed for war, but which has since evolved into a vital everyday tool that tells us where we are and when at any given point. But its use doesn’t stop there: GPS has transformed our navigation systems and our global trade, our farms and our supermarkets, our stop lights, banking networks, and our energy systems. It overturned online dating, exercise regimens, travel planning and takeaways. It reshaped our daily lives, and then it transformed us. When GPS took away our familiarity with getting lost, it also stripped us of our ability to hide – turning our place in the world into a mappable, knowable entity, and put us, a blinking blue dot on a screen, at its centre.In this thrilling, page-turning work of narrative non-fiction that touches on tech, geopolitics, international relations and economics – Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of an essential global system that touches all our lives. With echoes of Kleptopia, The Fifth Risk and Prisoners of Geography, as well as echoes of Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn and Entangled Life by Merlion Sheldrake in the way it exposes a hidden, esoteric system that we all rely on – this is a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets.

In this thrilling and utterly unique work of narrative non-fiction, Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of the GPS satellite system – in a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets This is the story of the Global Positioning System, the network of U.S. government satellites that encircle the earth: a vast web that, in a matter of decades, has transformed the way we understand space and time, making us critically dependent on vulnerable technology we often forget is even there.It is a system that was conceived of as a military product designed for war, but which has since evolved into a vital everyday tool that tells us where we are and when at any given point. But its use doesn’t stop there: GPS has transformed our navigation systems and our global trade, our farms and our supermarkets, our stop lights, banking networks, and our energy systems. It overturned online dating, exercise regimens, travel planning and takeaways. It reshaped our daily lives, and then it transformed us. When GPS took away our familiarity with getting lost, it also stripped us of our ability to hide – turning our place in the world into a mappable, knowable entity, and put us, a blinking blue dot on a screen, at its centre.In this thrilling, page-turning work of narrative non-fiction that touches on tech, geopolitics, international relations and economics – Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of an essential global system that touches all our lives. With echoes of Kleptopia, The Fifth Risk and Prisoners of Geography, as well as echoes of Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn and Entangled Life by Merlion Sheldrake in the way it exposes a hidden, esoteric system that we all rely on – this is a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets.

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.Colourful, 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 humour 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.