Sansei and Sensibility

Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.

 In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.

Publication date: May 5, 2020

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 232 pages 

ISBN: 9781566895781

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.

Longlisted for the 2020 Believer Book Award in Fiction

A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2020

A Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Book

An Esquire Best Book of Spring 2020

A Salon Must Read Spring Book

A Refinery29 Best Spring Book 2020

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2020

“The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita’s impressive powers.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. . . . Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“Sansei and Sensibility challenges and delights, while laying bare the familial loyalties we work to preserve and eschew.”

—The Boston Globe

“As gently humorous and entertaining as it is innovative and thought-provoking, Sansei and Sensibility is full of truths universally acknowledged, delivered in one of the most astute, idiosyncratic and important voices writing in America today.”

—The Star Tribune

“[D]aring and delightful. . . . Yamashita questions the wisdom of generations and the meaning of inheritance in these bold stories that transcend race, place, and time.”

—Esquire

“A genuine pleasure to read.”

—Buzzfeed

“A dazzling array of short stories. . . . Yamashita explores the question of inheritance—of how and what we inherit from our cultures, families, and histories—with poignant insight and humor.”

—Preety Sidhu and Jae-Yeon Yoo, Electric Literature

“A potent mashup of Austen and Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both entertaining and profound.”

—BookPage

“Ironic, wry, playful, with bright, shimmering surfaces and undercurrents strong and political.”

—Ariel Djanikian, The Rumpus

“Definitely the best Austen adaptation since Clueless.”

—Refinery29

“Yamashita seamlessly incorporates the Sansei experience into all seven of Austen’s timeless stories, and the result is brilliant, impactful, and of course, hysterical. . . . An unmissable work.”

—Paperback Paris

“Dazzling. Whether she is riffing on Jane Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo, Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb command of her craft.”

—Julie Otsuka

“Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants, wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation.”

—Naomi Hirahara

“This capacious collection is witty, sharp—funny at times, angry at times—always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am.”

—Karen Joy Fowler