Katherine Dunn fans have reason to cheer.

A novel the late “Geek Love” author put in a drawer decades ago will hit bookstore shelves later this year. A collection of short stories will follow.

The publishing industry website Literary Hub was the first to report the news.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish “Toad” this fall. In the autobiographical novel, Publishers Marketplace states, “a woman who has retreated into a life of isolation following a breakdown reflects on her time as an impoverished college student in the early 1970s in Portland, Oregon, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, and [on] the group of wealthy trust-fund kids she befriends.”

“Toad” was supposed to be Dunn’s third novel, after 1970’s “Attic” and 1971’s “Truck.” She abandoned it at some point during the Me Decade, when she was a struggling single mother, working as a waitress and a bartender.

“It was written in a very dark period -- she was kind of down, kind of depressed," her son, Eli Dapolonia, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2017. “She was normally such a positive person, so she decided she didn’t want it published.”

Dunn’s many fans surely will be thrilled to have “Toad” unexpectedly arrive, but it’s not the Portland writer’s unpublished novel they most want to read. That would be “Cut Man.”

Dunn had been working on “Cut Man,” her planned follow-up to the National Book Award-finalist “Geek Love,” for more than 20 years at the time of her 2016 death. Her son has said he has no plans to publish it.

“She didn’t want it out there,” Dapolonia said. “Those were her wishes.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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