Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
5 Rating(s)
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

Geek Love

Author: Katherine Dunn

Narrator: Christina Moore

Unabridged: 15 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 11/26/2007


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.

About Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn 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 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. Dunn died in 2016.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Kamisha on 2011-09-23 16:18:13

Once in a while I read a book that when I finish it I just dont know what to say. Thats not neccessarily a bad thing usually its actually a good thing and I think thats the case for this book. Geek Love was so disturbing and amazing that I just dont even really know what to say about it. Centered around the Binewski family who own a travelling carnival, Geek Love is about their lives told from the point of view of the youngest daughter Olympia, the albino dwarf. There are 4 or 5 depending on how you look at it kids in the Binewski family Arturo or Aqua Man, Elly and Iphy the siamese twins, Olympia the dwarf, and Chick/Fortunato the most normal of the Binewski kids. Olympia tells the story of the Binewskis with an honest though navie point of view at times. The parts of the book that are about Olys adult life in the normal world where she is much less innocent are especially heartbreaking. The book is very intriguing if sometimes disturbing but it is also very sad and touching. Its not neccessarily a book for everyone and it doesnt really fit into any specific genre but if you enjoy reading books that make you really think and feel different emotions, it definitely meets those requirements.

Goodreads review by Joey on April 03, 2017

Warning: this review contains spoilers. Read or don’t read it accordingly. I had a schizophrenic reaction to this book. On the one hand, it had a more profound impact on me than books—even some truly great ones—usually do. On the other hand, I thought it was sloppily edited, and Dunn’s prose ran the......more

Goodreads review by Will on January 04, 2023

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.Geek Love is an amazing book, audacious, moving, beautiful, substantive, creepy, upsetting, tragic and dark. So you think of yourself as different, an outsider, a freak in one......more

Goodreads review by Mario the lone bookwolf on February 13, 2022

The circus of life can be a terrifying horror freakshow too This on one of the greatest, weirdest, and definitively not for the faint of hearth novels with so many passages I still remember years after reading it, which is always a very good sign that the stuff was good and of high quality, (view spoiler)[ just as (hide spoiler)]......more

Goodreads review by Jason on January 29, 2015

WTF?! On the surface, Geek Love has it all: jealousy, betrayal, sexual objectification, and murderous revenge. It’s got a whole shitload of family drama topped off with a generous helping of physical deformities and possibly, possibly, a side of incest. (That part’s not too clear, though.) The proble......more

Goodreads review by Barry on August 31, 2014

If David Lynch wrote a novel, this would be it. This novel is repugnant, disgusting, and baffling. I loved it. Who'd have thought that a book narrated by a bald female hunchbacked albino dwarf would be so beautiful? The trials and tribulations of the Binewski family are shocking and sickening but ye......more