Talk of the Bay, Thursday, August 13, 5-6 PM
Guest host Ronnie Lipschutz talks with UCSC Literature Professor Emerita Karen Tei Yamashita about her new book, Sansei and Sensibility, and what it means to grow up Sansei in Los Angeles. According to the back cover of the book:
“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.”
Professor Yamashita is the author of eight books, including the I-Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award and recipient of the 2018 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She will also be doing an online reading organized by the UCSC Humanities Research Institute and Bookshop Santa Cruz at 7 PM, August 13, which you can view at https://www.crowdcast.io/e/zvz2wz0j.
Here are some additional resources for this interview:
A Boom Interview In conversation with Jonathan Crisman and Jason S. Sexton with Karen Tei Yamashita (Dec. 11, 2016).
Karen Tei Yamashita: A Reading in Paris (June 8, 2012).
Karen Tei Yamashita, “Speculative Literature” (January 23, 2015)
Melanie Pooch, “Karen Tei Yamashita’s Los Angeles, Tropic of Orange,” pp. 165-204, in: DiverCity – Global Cities as a Literary Phenomenon: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles in a Globalizing Age (2016).
