Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.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.

"Nobody's sentences heave and breathe like Dunn's do. Her language scintillates and sheds its scales,revealing truths that nobody else dares to utter, or can." -Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Orange World and Other Stories

About the Author
Katherine Dunn is the author of Geek Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, as well as the novels Attic, Truck, One-Ring Circus, and On Cussing. She was an award-winning boxing journalist whose work appeared in Esquire, KO Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, The Ring, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue. In 2004, Dunn and photographer Jim Lommasson won the Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize for their work on the book Shadow Boxers. She died in 2016.


Book Information
ISBN 9781250872296
Author Katherine Dunn
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Picador USA
Publisher St Martin's Press
Weight(grams) 312g
Dimensions(mm) 208mm * 138mm * 24mm