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The Kiss : A Memoir
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The Kiss : A Memoir Paperback - 2011

by Harrison, Kathryn

  • Used

One of today's best young American writers transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter.

Description

Random House Publishing Group. Used - Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Used - Good
$7.09
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Details

  • Title The Kiss : A Memoir
  • Author Harrison, Kathryn
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Good Condition
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 256
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Random House Publishing Group, U.S.A.
  • Date 2011-04-12
  • Features Price on Product - Canadian
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 5222367-6
  • ISBN 9780812979718 / 0812979710
  • Weight 0.59 lbs (0.27 kg)
  • Dimensions 8 x 5.19 x 0.54 in (20.32 x 13.18 x 1.37 cm)
  • Themes
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Library of Congress subjects Authors, American, Novelists, American - 20th century
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2012376498
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

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From the publisher

Kathryn Harrison's novels include Thicker than Water and Exposure, both New York Times Notable Books, and Poison, called "powerful and hypnotic" by The New York Times and "a masterpiece" by Lucy Grealy.  Harrison lives in New York.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.

One of us flies, the other brings a car, and in it we set out for some destination. Increasingly, the places we go are unreal places: the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon -- places as stark and beautiful and deadly as those revealed in satellite photographs of distant planets. Airless, burning, inhuman.

Against such backdrops, my father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.

We quarrel sometimes, and sometimes we weep. The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place. We go to Muir Woods in northern California, so shrouded in blue fog that the road is lost; and we drive down the Natchez Trace into deep, green Mississippi summer. The trees bear blossoms big as my head; their ivory petals drift to the ground and cover our tracks.

Separated from family and from the flow of time, from work and from school; standing against a sheer face of red rock one thousand feet high; kneeling in a cave dwelling two thousand years old; watching as a million bats stream from the mouth of Carlsbad Caverns into the purple dusk -- these nowheres and no-times are the only home we have.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“I couldn’t stop reading this. I’ll never stop remembering it.”—Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club

“Only a writer of extraordinary gifts could bring so much light to bear on so dark a matter, redeeming it with the steadiness of her gaze and the uncanny, heartbreaking exactitude of her language.”—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life

“Beautifully written . . . jumping back and forth in time yet drawing you irresistibly toward the heart of a great evil.”—The New York Times

“Like all good literature, The Kiss illuminates something that we knew already, while also teaching us things we had not even suspected.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“A darkly beautiful book, fearless and frightening, ironic and compassionate.”—Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother
 

“Harrison’s story is her own, but it is also a brilliant fiction, densely mythic, sometimes almost liturgical sounding and raw. She is both author and protagonist of a dark pilgrim’s progress.”—The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

About the author

Kathryn Harrison's novels include Thicker than Water and Exposure, both New York Times Notable Books, and Poison, called "powerful and hypnotic" by The New York Times and "a masterpiece" by Lucy Grealy. Harrison lives in New York.