Author(s): Karen Tei Yamashita

Short Stories | USA | Fiction Reductions

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 and humor.

"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." -Boston Globe

"Karen Tei Yamashita is a contemporary virtuoso of milieu. . . . 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." -Star Tribune

"Karen Tei Yamashita contends with the Western canon in this astute, pitch-perfect, and wryly funny short story collection. Yamashita recasts Jane Austen characters as Japanese Americans navigating themes familiar to anyone who has read Austen and her contemporaries-social tension, familial obligation, clumsy personal growth, all of the mundanities that add up to meaning-through the lens of Japanese immigrant and Japanese American experiences. A genuine pleasure to read." -Buzzfeed 

Author Biography: Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel,finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.