I Hotel - by Karen Tei Yamashita (Paperback)

About the Book

Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s.

Book Synopsis

An epic journey through one of America's most transformative decades via the stories of the activists, laborers, and students who shaped it.

Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.

The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians, and activists.

Review Quotes

Praise for I Hotel

Winner of the 2011 American Book Award
Winner of the 2010 California Book Award
Winner of the 2011 Asian American Literary Award Members' Choice Award
Winner of the 2011 Asian/Pacific American Library Association Book Award in Adult Fiction
Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award
Finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award in Fiction

"I Hotel is arguably the best book published on Asian American literary history." -The International Examiner

"As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking." --Washington Post Book World

"This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The literary equivalent of an intricate and vibrant street mural depicting a clamorous and righteous era of protest and creativity." --Booklist, starred review

"[An] extraordinary testimony of a revolutionary past." --The Nation

"Stylistically innovative, vertiginous, and sweeping." --2010 National Book Award Judges' Citation

"A surgically deft depiction of the political entwined with the personal. . . . I Hotel's complex taste lingers and haunts, like something alive." --The Star Tribune

"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." --Michael Schaub, NPR

"The breadth of I Hotel 's embrace is encyclopedic and its effect is kaleidoscopic." --The Chicago Tribune

"An amazing literary accomplishment and a brave and bold act of publishing." --Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers

"[I Hotel is] one of my favorite books of all time." --Jeff VanderMeer

"I wept, I laughed, I read silently while moving my lips. And I read the last twelve pages again and again as if an ancestor had written them." --Shawn Wong

About the Author

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, National Book Award finalist I Hotel, and Anime Wong. She has been a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.