Kathryn Davis

Hurst Writer in Residence
research interests:
  • Fiction Writing
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    • Washington University
    • CB 1122
    • One Brookings Dr.
    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    ​Kathryn Davis is the award-winning author of eight novels. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.

    Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road (2019). Her other books are Labrador(1988), The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993), Hell: A Novel (1998), The Walking Tour (1999), Versailles (2002), The Thin Place (2006) and Duplex (2013). She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, she won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of The Writing Program at Washington University.

    Writing Excerpt: The Thin Place

    The world was already acting strange millions of years ago.

    Water had its way with rock. Liquid beat solid. Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed. The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam. Exactly the way it is today.

    The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.

    Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.

    At least four glaciers covered Varennes over the past three million years.

    And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people--even to go so far as to imagine after people--is obscene.

    From Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place , (Little Brown, 2006).

    in the news:

    "Margaret the First" and "The Silk Road" are featured in The Guardian's Top 10 Experimental Feminist Books

    "Margaret the First" and "The Silk Road" are featured in The Guardian's Top 10 Experimental Feminist Books

    Professors Danielle Dutton and Kathryn Davis are mentioned in Literary Hub list of 20 best novels of the decade

    Professors Danielle Dutton and Kathryn Davis are mentioned in Literary Hub list of 20 best novels of the decade

    MFA Fiction faculty Kathryn Davis and Danielle Dutton both have stories in the new issue of Conjunctions

    MFA Fiction faculty Kathryn Davis and Danielle Dutton both have stories in the new issue of Conjunctions

    Read more news
    The Silk Road

    The Silk Road

    By Kathryn Davis

    The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there―paths on which they still seem to be traveling.

    The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.

    Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls―a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

    Versailles

    Versailles

    By Kathryn Davis

    Wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise, this novel of the life of Marie Antoinette finds the characters struggling to mind their step in the great ballroom of the world.

    The Walking Tour

    The Walking Tour

    By Kathryn Davis

    A walking tour in Wales ends in tragedy for two couples, leaving a legal and psychological nightmare for one of their children, Susan, to sort out. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

    The Thin Place

    The Thin Place

    By Kathryn Davis

    In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there - revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes' tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.

    The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf: A Novel

    The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf: A Novel

    By Kathryn Davis

    A young woman in flight from her past, and an old woman whose secrets are contained in the grave--with this configuration, Davis begins a novel of true bravura about opera, adultery, and murder.

    Labrador

    Labrador

    By Kathryn Davis

    A New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, Kathryn Davis's "dazzling first novel" (Kirkus Reviews) "transforms a literary commonplace -- a young girl's transition from childhood to adulthood -- into a brilliantly original story" (Belles Lettres). In LABRADOR, Davis conjures two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the elder, is beautiful and wayward. Kitty, the younger, is a loner whose only means of escaping the bewitching influence of her sister is to follow her grandfather to his home in Labrador, where she cannot avoid confronting the demons that haunt her. A tale of two sisters and the ambiguous, sometimes destructive ties that bind them, LABRADOR is a tender meditation on love, its joys, its limitations, and its hidden bitterness.

    Hell

    Hell

    By Kathryn Davis

    Part mystery, part domestic meditation and part horror story, ""Hell" is Davis's tour de force." (Joy Press, "The Village Voice.") In her brilliantly eerie third novel, three households coexist in a single restless vision.

    Duplex: A Novel

    Duplex: A Novel

    By Kathryn Davis

    "Utterly compelling . . . Davis writes with a stunning brilliance, creating fractured worlds that are both extraordinary and routine." ―The Boston Globe
    "A coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel . . . The world [Duplex] describes has gone cuckoo while its characters' anxieties remain stubbornly, drably, daringly familiar." ―Tom Bissell, Harper's Magazine