I Hotel (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Yamashita’s] novel is breathtaking in its scope and its energy and innovation make it a good fit with the exciting and transformative time period that it covers. . . . I Hotel demonstrates how complicated and finally irreducible history is—the many voices and perspectives it comprises, the divergent and winding paths it takes, the way it confounds conventional narrative. Yamashita celebrates this complexity, and she’s such a deft storyteller that you’ll end up celebrating it with her.” —Women’s Review of Books “Magnificent. . . . Intriguing.” —Library Journal “I Hotel is an amazing literary accomplishment and one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I have ever had. I believe it stands on the same plane of accomplishment as Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World—an amazing literary accomplishment and a brave and bold act of publishing.” —Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers “I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita is the kind of book that changed the way I think about what books are capable of. It’s a people’s history, an activist’s archive, a remembrance of time and place, and a powerful reminder that our assumptions about literature ought to be upended from time to time. It is not hyperbole to assert that I Hotel is unlike anything I have ever read. One of the most challenging and rewarding books, and an all-time favorite of mine.” —Matt Keliher, Subtext Books “I Hotel is at once heartrending and hilarious, both political and personal. And perhaps most thankfully, the writing is wicked smart without a drop of pretentiousness. Filled with pages that take big risks, I Hotel opens up new possibilities, not just for Asian American literature but also for contemporary fiction in general.” —Nami Mun, Asian American Literary Awards Judges’ Citation “Huge, messy, and frantically fun, I Hotel offers a very believable panorama of life at this time. . . . The portraits of these early generation Asian Americans . . . are quite moving and conveyed without sentimentality. It’s an impressive accomplishment from an author who continues to push the boundaries of innovative fiction.” —Rain Taxi “One of the the things that is so amazing about Karen Tei Yamashita’s most recent novel, I Hotel, is that she not only retrieves the sad beauty of a particularly fraught period of a particularly squalid community—Asian Americans in San Francisco during the 1960s-70s—but that she does so in a way that is also exhilarating, celebratory. . . . Which is why we need novels like I Hotel: to patiently help the world remember itself.” —American Book Review “I Hotel is arguably the best book published on Asian American literary history.” —The International Examiner