Justin Taylor at n+1:
When Katherine Dunn published “Rhonda Discovers Art” in the Summer 2010 issue of the Paris Review, the news was notable enough for a write-up in the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog. Dunn had published next to no fiction since Geek Love in 1989. The novel—which concerns a family of circus performers who cultivate deformities in their children for the sake of their freak show, and their flipper-limbed child who starts an amputation cult—was Sonny Mehta’s first acquisition after becoming the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf. It was something of a coup for Dunn, whose first two novels, Attic and Truck, had been published to little fanfare by Harper & Row in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, if people knew her work at all, it was as a journalist: she wrote for The Oregonian and The Willamette Week, local papers in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon. She had an advice column, covered boxing matches, and reviewed books. (Her archives, held at Lewis & Clark College, contain a letter from Stephen King thanking her for a kind review of Cujo.) Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and as a finalist for the National Book Award.
more here.
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