The Collected Rejections of Katherine Dunn

After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote whenever she could, between raising her son Eli on her own and working: writing a boxing column for the local newspaper, waitressing at a diner . . .