Endorsements (potential): Ruth Ozeki, Cornell West, Karen Joy
Fowler
3-city author tour
Early access copies
National print, radio, and online campaign
Targeted bookseller mailing
Promotion at: WI, AWP, BEA
Promotion on Coffee House Press e-newsletter, website, and social
media channels
Giveaways on Twitter, Instagram, & Goodreads
Simultaneous print and ebook release, with ebook ISBN to be
included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and
whenever print ISBN is listed
Targeted publicity to promote author's speaking engagements
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.
Longlisted for the 2020 Believer Book Award in Fiction
Kirkus, “Best Fiction of 2020”
Poets & Writers, “New and Noteworthy Books
Esquire, “Best Books of Spring 2020”
Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2020”
Salon.com, “Must Read Spring Books”
Refinery29, “Best Spring Books of 2020”
“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
“A dazzling array of short stories. . . . Yamashita explores the
question of inheritance—of how and what we inherit from our
cultures, families, and histories—with poignant insight and humor.”
—Preety Sidhu and Jae-Yeon Yoo, Electric Literature
“[C]ompelling. . . . Yamashita is a clever and spare writer. In
many of her touching, surreal short stories, she uses Austen as a
springboard into tales featuring Japanese Americans in California.
. . . Yamashita’s writing echoes the pain and strength of the
Japanese American experience. A potent mashup of Austen and
Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both
entertaining and profound.” —BookPage
“Exciting. . . . remarkable. . . . The tone of Sansei and
Sensibility is lighthearted, yes, but under the surface is outrage
against persistent racism and hierarchies of cultural influence
that make evoking Austen here less an act of playful transposition
and more a provocation. . . . ironic, wry, playful, with bright,
shimmering surfaces and undercurrents strong and political.” —Ariel
Djanikian, The Rumpus
“[I]t’s in the section’s later stories that [Yamashita’s] trademark
flamboyance comes forth and you can really feel her mind at work.
It’s that torrent of voice she can spin out of anything, whether
riffing on a visit to the gastroenterologist in ‘Colono:Scopy’ or
testing out Marie Kondo’s world-famous tidying methods in
‘KonMarimasu’. . . . It doesn’t take a Janeite to enjoy these
stories, or to sense that Yamashita’s engagement with Austen runs
somewhere between pastiche and parody.” —Jed Munson, Full Stop
“ What do you get when Jane Austen meets the Japanese-American
community of contemporary California? This smart, witty, perfectly
pitched collection of stories—definitely the best Austen adaptation
since Clueless.” —Refinery29
“Karen Tei Yamashita is one of America’s great unsung geniuses . .
. Here she’s mapped a series of stories onto the plots of Jane
Austen novels, telling the tales of Japanese immigrants to the
United States through the lens of their shared themes: inheritance,
marriage, familial heritage. Yamashita is writing some of her
finest stories yet.” —Literary Hub
“The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and
creative ambition all showcase Yamashita’s impressive powers.”
—Buzzfeed
“A dynamic collection. . . . Yamashita reconsiders canonical works,
questions cultural inheritance, and experiments with genre and
form.” —The Millions
“Yamashita’s latest work sparks joy and acknowledges pain,
remembers history and sources pop culture, traverses the modern
American West, and returns to Japanese traditions—all in under 200
pages. By the book’s finale, the only thing you’ll want to do is
pick up everything Yamashita has ever written. . . . Yamashita
seamlessly incorporates the Sansei experience into all seven of
Austen’s timeless stories, and the result is brilliant, impactful,
and of course, hysterical. . . . An unmissable work.” —Paperback
Paris
“Yamashita’s dizzying amalgamation of fiction and history results
in something that is both speculative and truthful. . . . Offers
such Sansei/Janeite delights as an LA County Mansfield Park, a
1960s Emma with revolutionary inclinations, and a Lady Susan
consisting of post-war postcards and aerograms between Tokyo and
California. . . . A gratifying jigsaw puzzle of a book, certain to
enrapture readers with both its individual pieces and the larger
picture those pieces create.” —Arkansas International
“Dazzling. An extraordinarily inventive collection of short stories
that takes us from Japan to Brazil to the fractured heart of
suburban postwar Japanese America. Whether she is riffing on Jane
Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo,
Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb
command of her craft.”—Julie Otsuka
“Through vignettes, recipes, and correspondence, master writer
Karen Tei Yamashita takes us through the rabbit hole of Japanese
America—in particular, her hometown of Gardena, California, where
an ethnic community culturally transformed a middle-class bedroom
town. Part Ozu meditation of everyday life, part modern folk tale
with colorful characters like a truth-telling dental hygienist,
Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of
what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants,
wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation. As in
all of her books, Yamashita deconstructs form and genre to create a
work that both delights and challenges” —Naomi Hirahara, Edgar
Award-winning author of Snakeskin Shamisen and Hiroshima Boy
“This capacious collection is witty, sharp—funny at times, angry at
times—always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen
would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am.” —Karen Joy
Fowler
Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
“This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is
irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense.”—Publishers
Weekly
“Immensely entertaining.”—Newsday
&ldquoShaped 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
“Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is
playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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