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Also by Karen Tei Yamashita:

I Hotel, June 2010
Paperback

I HOTEL
By: Karen Tei Yamashita

Coffee House Press
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
640 pages
ISBN: 1566892392
EAN: 9781566892391
Paperback
Add to Wish List

Fiction

“With humor and bite, [Yamashita] takes on waste, greed, stupidity, love, environmental and cultural apocalypse and the problems of migration and belonging—achieving a kind of cross between Kobo Abe, Gabriel García Márquez and Upton Sinclair.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced 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’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.

As Karen 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. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.

Media Buzz

On Point - December 30, 2010
On Point - December 6, 2010