The Extraordinary Enigmatic: Kathryn Davis’s ‘The Silk Road’

Wormholes, portals, wizards, dachshunds, geological time, haute cuisine: these are a few of the things you will find in ’s fiction. “My sensibility as an artist,” Davis said in a recent interview in , “is (thank God) a Frankenstein monster of parts.” Ever since the publication of her first book, , in 1988, she has shown herself to be a writer of graceful sentences and wild creative power—the “love child of and ,” Joy Press once called her. Wherever her imagination wants to go, Davis will follow, whether that means traveling from Denmark to upstate New York with an opera-writing murderess () or settling down in a 1950s Philadelphia partly populated by robots (). She has written a novel called , in which time collapses on itself within the walls of a semi-detached house, and a novel called , about