Sansei and Sensibility

"Karen Tei Yamashita is a contemporary virtuoso of milieu, using her genre-bending work to explore multicultural environments and the ways that race, immigration and globalization affect various locales and the people within them.... these inventive and illuminating short pieces stylishly examine an array of scenarios…including life in the Japanese immigrant community in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the internment during World War II of Japanese citizens in concentration camps…" Kathleen Rooney, Star Tribune

Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen's characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. 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 and humor.

Karen Tei Yamashita was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She is an Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature.

Additional Information:

• Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
• Published 2020
• 224 pages, softcover
• 8 X 5 inches