Karen Tei Yamashita - I-Hotel

Karen Tei Yamashita (Circle K Cycles, Tropic of Orange) is a respected and beloved professor at UCSC who teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. Nominated for a 2010 National Book Award, I Hotel is dazzling and ambitious–a hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy that 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 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. A tour de force through America’s most transformative decade.