I Hotel

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

2010 National Book Award Finalist
2011 American Book Award Winner
2010 California Book Award Winner
2011 Asian American Literary Award Fiction Finalist
2011 Asian American Literary Award Members Choice Winner
2011 Asian/Pacific American Library Association (APALA) Book Award Winner in Adult Fiction

Stunningly complete. . . . Yamashita accomplishes a dynamic feat of mimesis by throwing together achingly personal stories of lovers, old men, and orphaned children; able synopses of historical events and social upheaval . . . This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative.Publishers Weekly,starred review

Exuberant, irreverent, passionately researched . . . Yamashitas colossal novel of the dawn of Asian American culture is the literary equivalent of an intricate and vibrant street muraldepicting a clamorous and righteous era of protest and creativity.Booklist,starred review

I Hotel is a brilliant, vibrantly written exploration of politics, identity, radicalism, and activism. Fusing and bending styles, Yamashitas prose sweeps the reader along with the same manifestos-at-midnight energy that drove the massive cultural changes of the 60s and 70s. Over the years since I first read it, I Hotel has grown in importance to me as a reader, as a bookseller, as a writer, and as a citizen. It is an absolute masterpiece of twenty-first century American literature.Josh Cook

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

I Hotelis an explosive site, a profound metaphor and jazzy, epic novel rolled into one. Karen Tei Yamashita chronicles the colliding arts and social movements in the Bay Area of the wayward 70s with fierce intelligence, humor, and empathy.Jessica Hagedorn

If you were there in 1970s San Francisco, then this book is about you. At some point in readingI Hotel,I lost all objectivity. 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

A multiform swirl of a novel about a decade in the life of San Franciscos Chinatown and, by extension, the Asian experience in America. . . . With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point.Kirkus

This is an ambitious epic novel. . . . Stylistically innovative, vertiginous, and sweeping, this novel achieves a miraculous blend of fact and fiction and animates an epoch when individuals tried in vain to dissolve their personalities in the rhetoric of revolutionary idealism.2010 National Book Award Judges Citation

This is such a wonderful book. If you read Thomas Pynchon or you read David Foster Wallace, or any of those post-modern novels, this is the book you need to read.MPR News

As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking,I Hotelis the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. . . . [and] will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations. . . . In the end, the wayI Hotelaccounts for the Asian American movement is both sweet and sour. And for all the losses Yamashita records, there are, we know, great achievements as well. High among them is this beautiful book.Washington Post Book World

Brilliant. . . . [Yamashitas] ambition is achieved with efficiency, showmanship and wit. . . . A surgically deft depiction of the political entwined with the personal. . . . Yamashitas book recalls what art is for: To resist death and dementia . . . To kiss . . . you good-bye, leaving the indelible spit of our DNA on still moist lips. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Bitter. In other words,I Hotels complex taste lingers and haunts, like something alive.Star Tribune

Yamashita captures the fiery righteousnessand self-righteousnessof the civil-rights movement. . . . The complexity of the era that led to the birth of Asian America. Its a glorious tone poem, a rich reminder of the multicultural, multifaceted past from which our city grows.San Francisco Magazine

Its a stylistically wild ride, but its smart, funny and entrancing.Michael Schaub, NPR

The breadth ofI Hotels embrace is encyclopedic and its effect is kaleidoscopic. It wants to inform and dazzle us on the confusions and conclusions on the question of culture and assimilation.Chicago Tribune

[Yamashitas] novel is breathtaking in its scope and its energy and innovation make it a good fit with the exciting and transformative time period that it covers. . . .I Hoteldemonstrates how complicated and finally irreducible history isthe many voices and perspectives it comprises, the divergent and winding paths it takes, the way it confounds conventional narrative. Yamashita celebrates this complexity, and shes such a deft storyteller that youll end up celebrating it with her.Womens Review of Books

Magnificent. . . . Intriguing.Library Journal

I Hotelis an amazing literary accomplishment and one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I have ever had. I believe it stands on the same plane of accomplishment as Roberto BolaosSavage Detectivesand Edward P. JonessThe Known Worldan amazing literary accomplishment and a brave and bold act of publishing.Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers

I Hotelby Karen Tei Yamashita is the kind of book that changed the way I think about what books are capable of. Its a peoples history, an activists archive, a remembrance of time and place, and a powerful reminder that our assumptions about literature ought to be upended from time to time. It is not hyperbole to assert thatI Hotelis unlike anything I have ever read. One of the most challenging and rewarding books, and an all-time favorite of mine.Matt Keliher, Subtext Books

I Hotelis at once heartrending and hilarious, both political and personal. And perhaps most thankfully, the writing is wicked smart without a drop of pretentiousness. Filled with pages that take big risks,I Hotelopens up new possibilities, not just for Asian American literature but also for contemporary fiction in general.Nami Mun,Asian American Literary Awards Judges Citation

Huge, messy, and frantically fun,I Hoteloffers a very believable panorama of life at this time. . . . The portraits of these early generation Asian Americans . . . are quite moving and conveyed without sentimentality. Its an impressive accomplishment from an author who continues to push the boundaries of innovative fiction.Rain Taxi

One of the the things that is so amazing about Karen Tei Yamashitas most recent novel,I Hotel,is that she not only retrieves the sad beauty of a particularly fraught period of a particularly squalid communityAsian Americans in San Francisco during the 1960s-70sbut that she does so in a way that is also exhilarating, celebratory. . . . Which is why we need novels likeI Hotel: to patiently help the world remember itself.American Book Review

I Hotelis arguably the best book published on Asian American literary history.The International Examiner

Author Bio

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.