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.
Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen's characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.
Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita
“Fiercely satirical. . . . Yamashita presents [an] intricate plot with mordant wit.” —New York Times Book Review
“A stunner. . . . An exquisite mystery novel. But this is a novel of dystopia and apocalypse; the mystery concerns the tragic flaws of human nature.” —Library Journal, starred review
“Yamashita handles her eccentrics and the setting of their adventures with panache. David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel García Márquez.” —Publishers Weekly
“With a subtle ominousness, Yamashita sets up her hopeful, prideful characters—and, in the process, the entire genre of pioneer lit—for a fall.” —Village Voice
“Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.” —Kirkus
