I Hotel Audiobook

Quotes

• “[Yamashita’s] novel is breathtaking in its scope, and its energy and innovation make it a good fit with the exciting and transformative time period that it covers…I Hotel demonstrates how complicated and finally irreducible history is—the many voices and perspectives it comprises, the divergent and winding paths it takes, the way it confounds conventional narrative. Yamashita celebrates this complexity, and she’s such a deft storyteller that you’ll end up celebrating it with her.”

  — Women’s Review of Books

• “One of the things that is so amazing about Karen Tei Yamashita’s most recent novel, I Hotel, is that she not only retrieves the sad beauty of a particularly fraught period of a particularly squalid community—Asian Americans in San Francisco during the 1960s-70s—but that she does so in a way that is also exhilarating, celebratory…Which is why we need novels like I Hotel: to patiently help the world remember itself.”

  — American Book Review

• “Exuberant, irreverent, passionately researched…Yamashita’s colossal novel of the dawn of Asian American culture is the literary equivalent of an intricate and vibrant street mural depicting a clamorous and righteous era of protest and creativity.”

  — Booklist

• “A multiform swirl of a novel about a decade in the life of San Francisco’s Chinatown and, by extension, the Asian experience in America…With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “The breadth of I Hotel’s embrace is encyclopedic and its effect is kaleidoscopic. It wants to inform and dazzle us on the confusions and conclusions on the question of culture and assimilation.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “Smart, funny, and entrancing.”

  — NPR

• “As in her previous works, Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful, in a wildly multicultural landscape…A passionate, bighearted novel.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “Brilliant…[Yamashita’s] ambition is achieved with efficiency, showmanship, and wit…A surgically deft depiction of the political entwined with the personal…I Hotel’s complex taste lingers and haunts, like something alive.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

• “This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)