Overview

A woman invests in a series of sex robots to get her off and comes to terms with the limitations-and real threat-of automated companionship. A knowing young student pursues an affair with an older man, the poet in residence at the university where she studies writing, and weighs the benefits and costs of their arrangement. A mother moves to a farm with her family and must come to terms with the violence simmering beneath her skin. Near Flesh is the first and only collection of short fiction by Katherine Dunn, the author of the bestselling novel Geek Love. These nineteen stories are, like Dunn's entire body of work, attuned to the spit and grit of tough living. They pulse with yearning for a more prosperous life, for sexual satisfaction, to escape abusive husbands and the disappointments of convention. A better life, for these mostly female protagonists, seems always just out of reach. In Near Flesh, Dunn explores the struggle of women to live on their own terms, and the desire to relish-rather than squash-what distinguishes a person.

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9780374602352

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Reviews

Praise for Near Flesh: ""[D]elightfully offbeat . . . Dunn vividly captures her protagonists' attempts to cope with the turbulence of their lives."" --Publishers Weekly ""These sharp-edged, disturbing, often black-humored and unabashedly nasty stories will fascinate Dunn fans."" --Kirkus Reviews Praise for Katherine Dunn: ""Dunn's style is unlike that of anyone living or dead: simultaneously practical and bonkers; lovely and nasty."" --Molly Young, The New York Times Book Review ""An expansive novelist giving voice to American estrangement."" --Michael LaPointe, The Atlantic ""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, author of The Antidote ""Dunn's writing is dynamic and propulsive . . . Her didactic prose surpasses the spare, dispassionate style common among today's novelists. One is never bored."" --Terry Nguyen, Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Information

Katherine Dunn (1945-2016) is the author of Geek Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award, as well as the novels Toad, Attic, and Truck. She was an award-winning boxing journalist whose work appeared in Esquire, KO Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Ring, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue. Her writing on boxing is collected in One Ring Circus. In 2004, Dunn and the photographer Jim Lommasson won the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for their work on the book Shadow Boxers.

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