(Ebook) Geek Love by Katherine Dunn ISBN 9780307794482, 9780375713347, 0307794482, 0375713344

(Ebook) Geek Love by Katherine Dunn ISBN 9780307794482, 9780375713347, 0307794482, 0375713344

Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch & patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, & radioisotopes).Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs & a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy & Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, & the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—& dangerous—asset.  As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion & 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 & the normal, the beautiful & the ugly, the holy & the obscene. Family values will never be the same.°°° Author Q&AQ: This is such an unusual story—where did you get the idea for it?A: It started as a joke. It happened because one summer day in 1979 my 8-year-old son flatly refused to go along on my favorite walk up the hills to the rose test garden in the park. I went alone, sulking, & wound up perched on a brick step glaring at the experimental roses.The nature vs nurture debate had fascinated me for years. The potential for revelations & manipulations rising from the study of genetics was a topic for frequent & gleeful speculation over late night cocoa in my kitchen. That day the ornate roses set me thinking again about the possibility of deliberately monkeying with human DNA to breed desirable traits in our progeny as the plant folk did with these flowers. The notion always held a chilling element for me—what if human character were completely determined by genetics & physiology so that science might eventually eradicate the mystery of personality? If humans were as predictable as chemical reactions, where would stori