Kathryn Davis is the author of seven novels: Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell,The Walking Tour, Versailles, The Thin Place and Duplex. She has been the recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2006 Lannan Award for Fiction. She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is Hurst Senior Writer-in-Residence.