Description
Book SynopsisPraise for Karen Tei Yamashita:
"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." NPR
"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." New York Times Book Review
With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point." Kirkus
"Magnificent. . . . Intriguing." Library Journal
"This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Scintillations is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classiciststheir disciplines, and Yamashita's engagement with them, are a way for her explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, Orientalism, and community.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, 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.
Trade Review“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 “While this account may provide context for some of the themes found in Yamashita’s fiction, the author’s personal reflections on a dark period of American history will resonate with a larger audience concerned with how some U.S. organizations have targeted specific communities.” —Library Journal, *starred review* “Yamashita positions these stories within larger questions—what is the meaning of evil, justice, war, and forgiveness? . . . Yamashita’s hopscotch approach makes the deeper claim that there is no explanation and no possible reparation for events like slavery, internment, or the bombing of Hiroshima—only the disorienting reality they produce and the legacy of pain, distrust, and shame they leave behind.” —Publishers Weekly “Letters to Memory is not only for history buffs searching out new perspectives, but for anyone wanting to better understand humanity.” —NewPages
