Sansei and Sensibility - by Karen Tei Yamashita (Paperback)

About the Book

Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen's characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.

Book Synopsis

Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen's characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance-familial, cultural, emotional, artistic--really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.

Review Quotes

Praise for Sansei and Sensibility

Longlisted for the 2020 Believer Book Award in Fiction
A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2020
A Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Book of 2020
An Esquire Best Book of Spring 2020
A Salon Must Read Book of Spring 2020
A Refinery29 Best Spring Book of 2020

"The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita's impressive powers." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. . . . Yamashita's reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny--and as on target as the movie Clueless." --Kirkus, starred review

"Sansei and Sensibility challenges and delights, while laying bare the familial loyalties we work to preserve and eschew." --The Boston Globe

"As gently humorous and entertaining as it is innovative and thought-provoking, Sansei and Sensibility is full of truths universally acknowledged, delivered in one of the most astute, idiosyncratic and important voices writing in America today." --The Star Tribune

"A dazzling array of short stories. . . . Yamashita explores the question of inheritance--of how and what we inherit from our cultures, families, and histories--with poignant insight and humor." --Preety Sidhu and Jae-Yeon Yoo, Electric Literature

"Yamashita's writing echoes the pain and strength of the Japanese American experience. A potent mashup of Austen and Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both entertaining and profound." --BookPage

"Ironic, wry, playful, with bright, shimmering surfaces and undercurrents strong and political." --Ariel Djanikian, The Rumpus

"Definitely the best Austen adaptation since Clueless." --Refinery29

"Karen Tei Yamashita is one of America's great unsung geniuses . . . Here she's mapped a series of stories onto the plots of Jane Austen novels, telling the tales of Japanese immigrants to the United States through the lens of their shared themes: inheritance, marriage, familial heritage. Yamashita is writing some of her finest stories yet." --Literary Hub

"The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita's impressive powers." --Buzzfeed

"Yamashita seamlessly incorporates the Sansei experience into all seven of Austen's timeless stories, and the result is brilliant, impactful, and of course, hysterical. . . . An unmissable work." --Paperback Paris

"Dazzling. An extraordinarily inventive collection of short stories that takes us from Japan to Brazil to the fractured heart of suburban postwar Japanese America. Whether she is riffing on Jane Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo, Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb command of her craft."--Julie Otsuka

"Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants, wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation. As in all of her books, Yamashita deconstructs form and genre to create a work that both delights and challenges." --Naomi Hirahara

"This capacious collection is witty, sharp--funny at times, angry at times--always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am."

About the Author

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.