The book’s first run of 20,000, with an additional 3,500 printed, is a “significant” number for what is essentially a first novel, Friedman said. Everybody is noting its originality,” Friedman said. Katherine Dunn is a literary writer with commercial overtones. Knopf’s new editor-in-chief at the time the manuscript was submitted, Sonny Mehta, reportedly loved the book, as did everyone there from editors to designers, senior vice president Jane Friedman said. In this clan, defects are looked upon as “specialties.” The stranger you look, the more you’re loved. Papa Al’s failed experiments end up on display at the carnival, floating in jars. The resulting babies include Arty, the child with flippers in place of arms and legs, a pair of piano-playing Siamese twins, and Olympia, the albino hunchback dwarf who narrates the story. So Al’s wife Crystal Lil, a former geek (a carnival performer of grotesque acts such as biting the heads off live chickens), ingests cocaine, arsenic, insecticides and radioisotopes in the effort to radicalize her genes.
His theory is that, along with boosting business, he will be bestowing upon his children “the inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves.” As for a reason, the 43-year-old Portland author describes her vision as “a peek over the edge.”Īs Dunn’s tale goes, Aloysius Binewski, proprietor of a traveling circus called Binewski’s Fabulon, gets the notion to breed mutant children who will perform as sideshow freaks.
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