Kathryn A Davis Books

Back in print, Kathryn Davis’s riveting debut about the indelible pacts and hidden hatreds of sisterhood Labrador is the story of two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the eldest, is willful, beautiful, and wayward; to Kitty, the youngest, she is the radiant center around which everything revolves. Kitty, too, is willful, but in the brooding manner of the inveterate loner. She is the one who is visited by an angel, Rogni, who reshapes her beliefs by telling her eerie, enigmatic fables that defy time and place, parables about bears, martyrs, and imprisoned daughters that seem to contain warnings about betrayals and violence to come. In the pared-down landscape of the far north, where the girls’ grandfather has his home, Kitty escapes the orbit of her sister and begins to come to terms with the demons—and the enchantments—that have been her birthright from the start. In Labrador, Davis’s first novel, one finds the hallmark lyricism and startling narrative swerves, the layered atmospherics, the fierce intelligence and wit, and above all the wild and transformative qualities of her imagination that have defined her work ever since.

Haunting take on the fluidity and circuitousness of human life, fragmented through the stories of a group of eight siblings--the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. The novel opens deep inside the labyrinth of an isolated settlement, following a yoga class led by Jee Moon, the mysterious woman who has uncanny and uncomfortable ties to the siblings. After they perform the corpse pose and one of the siblings doesn't arise, readers are led into the slipstream of the siblings' collective lifetime. The narrative braids scenes from their turbulent childhood--spent with their capricious mother, stoic father, and odd Nanny--with moments from their individual and collective memories, from the senseless violence of a prison break to the various lovers of their lives. Even as the siblings disagree over which details belong to whose memories, they prove that the combined sum of the whole is greater than the parts as they craft their family--and, by extension, human--history as they live it

Engaging Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. Through ethnographic studies based in Nepal and Hawai`i and by depicting ways in which engaged language policy embodies the intersection of critical inquiry, participant involvement, and ongoing engaged language planning processes, this text offers an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to language education policy making. Engaging Language Policy and Practices is an ideal main or supplementary text for graduate courses in language policy and planning.