Karen Tei Yamashita: 9 books

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines...

An excursion through the Japanese-American internment using archival materials from the author’s own family. In this unique memoir, Karen Tei Yamashita draws on her family’s history and creates a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic...

The first of ten novellas in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era.   Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s...

The seventh novella in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era.   Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s...

During the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants entered Brazil by the tens of thousands. In more recent decades that flow has been reversed: more than 200,000 Japanese-Brazilians and their families have relocated to Japan. Examining these significant but rarely studied transnational...

An “immensely entertaining” historical novel about Japanese immigrants and their struggle to make a home in a Brazilian rainforest (Newsday).   In 1925, a band of Japanese immigrants arrive in Brazil to carve a utopia out of the jungle. Yamashita conjures “an intricate and fascinating epoch”...

"I Hotel" is the third novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yamashita’s cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.

Yamashita “blends the . . . surrealism of Garcia Marquez, bizarre science fiction . . . à la Stanislaw Lem, and a gift for satirizing . . . that recalls Heller of Catch-22” (Publishers Weekly). This freewheeling black comedy features a bizarre cast of characters, including a Japanese man...

“David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez” in this novel set in a dystopian Los Angeles from a National Book Award finalist (Publishers Weekly). Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless,...