Circle K Cycles - Softcover

Yamashita, Karen Tei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891086 ISBN 13: 9781566891080

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2001

Synopsis

"Yamashita is so tuned into now, she can see tomorrow."—Booklist on Tropic of Orange, starred review

"Through the Arc of the Rainforest progresses toward an apocalyptic resolution that spreads out like a Bosch triptych reproduced by Gauguin. In this, her first novel, Ms. Yamashita presents a critique of human waste and stupidity that is fluid and poetic as well as terrifying."—The New York Times Book Review

Yamashita’s innovative melding of fiction and essay explores issues such as labor, nationalism, and cultural diaspora. When the grandchildren of Japanese immigrants to Brazil move to Japan to assume the manual work native Japanese people no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, their homesickness for details of their birthplace, clash with the status quo. This book of hybrids—merging collage with text, story with history—opens a door onto one of the important issues of the new century.

Yamashita has a powerful story to tell about a community that is globally extensive and the freedom—physical and emotional—implied by that new geography.

Karen Tei Yamashita is a winner of the American Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Award. She is an assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and is currently Professor of Literature and Creative Writing and the co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reviews

American Book Award-winner Karen Tei Yamashita considers various cultural exchanges between Japanese and Brazilians in Circle K Cycles. Focusing primarily on the descendants of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil who leave to find factory work in Japan, it is at once short story collection, memoir and scrapbook charmingly enlivened with snapshots, advertisements, signs, random factoids and graphics. The situations Yamashita describes are as diverse as the people who experience them from how to cook rice to what to do if you lose your fingers in an industrial accident and she brings it all together with humor and heart. National advertising; author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566891086
• ISBN 13: 9781566891080
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220