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Narrated by Angela Lin, Nancy Wu, Ramon de Ocampo
Karen Tei YamashitaUnabridged — 22 hours, 20 minutes
Narrated by Angela Lin, Nancy Wu, Ramon de Ocampo
Karen Tei YamashitaUnabridged — 22 hours, 20 minutes
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…I Hotel is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, I Hotel is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews…In the end, the way I Hotel accounts 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.
—The Washington Post
Starred Review.
In Yamashita's latest, she strings together a stunningly complete vision of San Francisco's Asian American community in the late 1960s and early '70s, using the titular inn as a meeting point for ten loosely-connected novellas, each covering a single year. Focusing on the struggle for equality and peace as it involved this particular community, Yamashita's work also incorporates a broad view of the Asian and Asian American experiences, from Japanese internment camps to the Marcos dictatorship. 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; and public figures like Lenin and Malcolm X (Yamashita's opening line: "So I'm Water Cronkite, dig?"). Despite its experimental and fictionalized nature, the novel reads more like a patchwork oral history, determined to relate the facts of its setting and, more importantly, the feelings of it; with varied commingling of voices and formats (stream-of-consciousness, slangy first person, quotes, dossiers, academic papers, even written-out choreography), the narrative reads like a collection of primary sources. Though it isn't for everyone, this powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense. 30 b&w photos and illus.
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2010 National Book Award Finalist2011 American Book Award Winner2010 California Book Award Winner2011 Asian American Literary Award Fiction Finalist2011 Asian American Literary Award Members’ Choice Winner2011 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 . . . Yamashita’s colossal novel of the dawn of Asian American culture is the literary equivalent of an intricate and vibrant street mural depicting 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, Yamashita’s 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 Hotel is 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 reading I 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 Francisco’s 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 Hotel is 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 way I Hotel accounts 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. . . . [Yamashita’s] ambition is achieved with efficiency, showmanship and wit. . . . A surgically deft depiction of the political entwined with the personal. . . . Yamashita’s 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 Hotel ’s complex taste lingers and haunts, like something alive.” —Star Tribune“Yamashita captures the fiery righteousness—and self-righteousness—of the civil-rights movement. . . . The complexity of the era that led to the birth of Asian America. It’s a glorious tone poem, a rich reminder of the multicultural, multifaceted past from which our city grows.” —San Francisco Magazine“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. It wants to inform and dazzle us on the confusions and conclusions on the question of culture and assimilation.” —Chicago Tribune“[Yamashita’s] 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 Hotel demonstrates how complicated and finally irreducible history is—the many voices and perspectives it comprises, the divergent and winding paths it takes, the way it confounds conventional narrative. Yamashita celebrates this complexity, and she’s such a deft storyteller that you’ll end up celebrating it with her.” —Women’s Review of Books“Magnificent. . . . Intriguing.” —Library Journal
“I Hotel is 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 Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World—an amazing literary accomplishment and a brave and bold act of publishing.” —Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers“I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita is the kind of book that changed the way I think about what books are capable of. It’s a people’s history, an activist’s 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 that I Hotel is 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 Hotel is 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 Hotel opens 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 Hotel offers a very believable panorama of life at this time. . . . The portraits of these early generation Asian Americans . . . are quite moving and conveyed without sentimentality. It’s 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 Yamashita’s most recent novel, I Hotel, is that she not only retrieves the sad beauty of a particularly fraught period of a particularly squalid community—Asian Americans in San Francisco during the 1960s-70s—but that she does so in a way that is also exhilarating, celebratory. . . . Which is why we need novels like I Hotel: to patiently help the world remember itself.” —American Book Review
“I Hotel is arguably the best book published on Asian American literary history.” —The International Examiner
Listening becomes almost visual in these accounts of Asian-Americans living in 1960s and ‘70s San Francisco. The 10 related novellas that comprise this work touch on art, politics, activism, and deep Asian familial bonds and traditions. Casting a variety of dynamic performers imbues each novella with a distinct essence and power, resulting in a listening experience that is always fresh. The characters are diverse, and the performances offer an astonishing spectrum of accents and expression. The patchwork quilt of historical experience ultimately evolves into depictions of today's vibrant Asian-American culture. A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
An overstuffed, multiform swirl of a novel about a decade in the life of San Francisco's Chinatown and, by extension, the Asian experience in America.
Yamashita (Circle K Cycles, 2001, etc.) blends prose, theater and art into this set of related novellas centered on a shabby residential hotel. The story opens on the Lunar New Year of 1968. Says her narrator, "Now we know the Vietnamese call it Tet, but the Chinese own it: New Year, they call it," a time in Vietnam as in Chinatown of explosions, bright lights and revolutionary fervor. Vietnam haunts young Paul, who worries about dying there even as he prepares for his father's funeral; by Chinese reckoning, he is too young to take his place at the head of the family, but not to be swept up into a faraway conflict. Paul take his cues from Chen, a Mao- and Gertrude Stein–quoting collector of postcards, and from alternative journalist Edmund, who covers the foment over whether to establish an ethnic-studies program at the university and declare Chinese New Year a holiday in the local school system. The '60s shade into the '70s, and Yamashita's prose gives way to blocks of play-like dialogue complete with set directions ("Raucous laughter. sound of James Brown: "Like a Sex Machine"), as new characters come onto the stage that is the I Hotel, representing many ethnicities: a Filipino American farm workers' union activist; a Japanese American organizer who turns a sweatshop into the I-Hotel Cooperative Garment Factory, its machines "whirring with industry and purpose"; a burly Samoan who escapes being busted for illegally fishing by telling a warden, "See this tattoo?...This is my hunting license." Elements of the picaresque and the satirical play against passages that are almost documentary as the characters struggle to keep the hotel from being gentrified—and to keep the revolution alive in a time when just about everyone seems tired of politics.
With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point.
| BN ID: | 2940169071153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 06/24/2011 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
