Dark Soil: Fictions and Mythographies

Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.

Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she’s called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.

Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.

Publication date: May 7, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 304 Pages

ISBN: 9781566896870

Featuring work by Brandon Shimoda, Craig Santos Perez, Sesshu Foster, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Saretta Morgan, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Juliana Spahr

Angie Sijun Lou is a Kundiman Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, and Amerasia Journal. She lives in Oakland.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"A centrifugal, suggestive way of looking at place through the lens of story."

—Kirkus Reviews

"A stunning anthology uses the strength of story, both fiction and nonfiction, to address missing histories and revive the narratives that have too often been omitted."

—Shelf Awareness

"Editor Angie Sijun Lou presents an innovative, provocative anthology. Fiction and mythographies (mythos + geography) engender piercing truths.”

—Terry Hong, Booklist

"Exploring a variety of marginalized lives, these stories and essays show the complex mix of culture, history, politics, and imagination that can make up a single place, whether that be California, Guam, or Ohio.”

—David Lewis, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Countering the relentless tendency of capitalist modernity, the exquisite geography of these chapters annihilates time by space. I can’t stop thinking about José Saramago, especially Raised from the Ground. Dark Soil’s multiple, stubborn narrators creatively mix humor and surprise with the extraordinary brutalities of ordinary violence. The book sings of planetary consciousness, refusing partitions and enclosures by remembering life in excess of such deadliness.”

—Ruth Wilson Gilmore

"Karen Tei Yamashita and the essayists of Dark Soil have brought to life figures who have been passed over in history and literature. This book is like burning thousands of incense sticks in their honor. Dark Soil is a must read."

—George Ow Jr.