Kathryn Harrison

Displaying her "real talent for conjuring far-flung times and places," Kathryn Harrison tells the mesmerizing story of her 200-mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. In the spring of 1999, Kathryn Harrison set out to walk the centuries-old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. "Not a vacation, “she calls it, "but a time out of time." With a heavy pack, no hotel reservations, and little Spanish, she wanted an experience that would...

In essays written over the course of more than a decade, Harrison has created a beautifully detailed and rigorously honest family album. She writes for the first time in almost two decades about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was. Harrison writes about the birth of her youngest daughter, and how she finally came to understand her own mother's attitudes toward parenting. And she reflects on the loss of her...

"Kathryn Harrison always understood that her family was beyond eccentric -- they'd breached the bounds of the unconventional. She was largely raised by her grandparents in an outsized Tudor confection of a house on the periphery of Bel Air, which she thought of as "Sunset," her kingdom of the imagination, inhabited by the past and its numberless artifacts. True wandering Jews, her grandparents had arrived in Los Angeles in the forties after dramatic,...

Stretching across Asia and into eastern Europe and northern Africa, the Silk Road opened the world to new ideas, products, and cultures. Because the Mongols controlled so much of the territory across this network of pathways, trade between east and west flourished, spreading silk, spices, technology, and languages. In addition, the Mongols were known for their different religious traditions, including Buddhism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, which were...

In this richly textured historical novel, best-selling author Kathryn Harrison spins a mesmerizing tale of forbidden passion and terrifying superstition in 17th-century Spain. As the Spanish Inquisition conducts its ruthless reign of terror, the lives of two women-one, the free spirited daughter of a poor silk farmer; the other, the French princess doomed to marry the deformed King of Spain-unravel like the cocoons of silkworms. A nationally-acclaimed...