Nominated for the National Book Award, Geek Love is mesmerizing, daring, and unconventional. Award-winning novelist Katherine Dunn fascinates and amazes much the same way tornados, earthquakes, and volcanos do. No one wants to be a victim, but most find the event too hypnotic to ignore. In order to save their traveling carnival from bankruptcy, the Binewskis are creating their own brood of sideshow freaks. Under Al’s careful direction, the pregnant Lil ingests radioisotopes, insecticides, and arsenic to make her babies “special.” As the oldest daughter, albino dwarf Olympia, puts listeners in the ring side seat, her family’s incredible drama erupts and spills over into the “normal” world. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart, this brilliantly daring novel is shocking and delightful. Christina Moore’s vibrant narration conspires with Katherine Dunn’s evocative, energetic prose to shock us at seeing something of ourselves in these exotic characters.

F uck the Fuckity Fuckin’ Fucker. Readers of Katherine Dunn won’t be surprised that this was her father’s favorite sentence, or that, as a young girl, she heard it as a kind of profane poem, a secret song. For many of us, the language of Geek Love carries a similar staying power, born of Dunn’s agile use of language and her strange, beautiful diction. And as a true exegete of the expletive, she remained undividedly devoted to obscenity?both as scholar and practitioner. In On Cussing, Dunn sketches a brief history of swear words and creates something of a field guide to their types and usages, from the common threat (“I’ll squash you like a shithouse mouse”) to the portmanteau intensifier (“Fan-fucking-tastic”). But she also explores their physiology?the physical impact on the reader or listener?and makes an argument for how and when to cuss with maximum effect. Equal parts informative and hilarious, this volume will delight Dunn’s legion of fans, but it’s also a must-have for anyone looking to more successfully wield their expletives, be it in writing or in everyday speech.

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.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.

Colorful, 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 humor 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.