Geek Love - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Katherine Dunn (Paperback)

About the Book

At once a highly regarded novel and an enduring cult classic, "Geek Love" is the story of the Binewskis, a carnival family of human oddities. As Dunn charts their journey across the U.S. backwaters, their Machiavellian rivalries, and their galvanic effect on gawking crowds, she takes on everything from definitions of beauty to organized religion to family values.

Book Synopsis

National Book Award Finalist - Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities--with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

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 U.S., 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.

Review Quotes

"A Fellini movie in ink. . . . Geek Love throws a punch." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Wonderfully descriptive. . . . Dunn [has a] tremendous imagination." --The New York Times Book Review

"Like most great novels, this one keeps the reader marveling at the daring of the author." -Philadelphia Inquirer

"Unrelentingly bizarre . . . perverse but riveting. . . . Will keep you turning the pages." -Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She is the author of three novels: Attic; Truck; and Geek Love, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize. She died in 2016.