Karen Tei Yamashita: Short Fiction and Essays

Karen Tei Yamashita's incredible skill at exploding the bounds of genre is on full display in these four books of stories, essays, and other creative writing!

From a short story that takes the form of a recipe, to composite characters in her memoir that represent different academic specialities, to collage-infused writing about culture and tradition, these four books illustrate the remarkable versatility and originality of Yamashita’s work—across a twenty-year span of her career.

20% off cover price!

Bundle contains:

Sansei and Sensibility (2020): a lively collection of short stories in which generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters, traversing class, race, and gender to leap into our modern world with wit and humor. 

Letters to Memory (2017): a memoir such as only Karen Yamashita could conceive of, this dive into the Yamashita family archive and Japanese internment runs a documentary impulse through filters that shimmer with imagination.

Anime Wong (2014): a memory book of performances, Yamashita’s theatrical work is fiction interpreted by the body in real time, reflecting questions of gender, identity, Orientalism, and racial politics.

Circle K Cycles (2001): a stunning book of hybrids which merges fiction, essay, and pop culture collage to illustrate a global society that resists heritage-by-hyphenation and open the door onto important issues of the twenty-first century: labor, nationalism, and cultural assimilation.

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 U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.