Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

A freewheeling black comedy bound up in cultural confusion, political insanity, and environmental catastrophe. 

A Japanese man with a ball floating six inches in front of his head, an American ceo with three arms, and a Brazilian peasant who discovers the art of healing by tickling one’s earlobe rise to the heights of wealth and fame before arriving at disasters—both personal and ecological—that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil.

Publication date: September 5, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 272 pages

ISBN: 9781566894852

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

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, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“This satiric morality play about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest unfolds with a diversity and fecundity equal to its setting. . . . Yamashita seems to have thrown into the pot everything she knows and most that she can imagine—all to good effect.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Dazzling. . . . A seamless mixture of magic realism, satire and futuristic fiction.” 

—The San Francisco Chronicle