Katherine Dunn.  Near Flesh . MCD/FSG, 2025. When Katherine Dunn published “Rhonda Discovers Art” in the Summer 2010 issue of the Paris Review, the news was notable enough for a write-up in the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog. Dunn had published next to no fiction since Geek Love in 1989. The novel—which concerns a family of circus performers who cultivate deformities in their children for the sake of their freak show, and their flipper-limbed child who starts an amputation cult—was Sonny Mehta’s first acquisition after becoming the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf. It was something of a coup for Dunn, whose first two novels, Attic and Truck , had been published to little fanfare by Harper & Row in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, if people knew her work at all, it was as a journalist: she wrote for The Oregonian and The Willamette Week, local papers in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon . She had an advice column, covered boxing matches, and reviewed books.…