Events

[FICTION] Since composing perhaps the first serious stab at hypertext literature in 1987, Michael Joyce has restlessly explored the landscape of strongly narrative yet conceptually innovative fiction. His latest book, Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden, published by Buffalo’s Starcherone Press, is an imagined string of letters written by French philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault balancing a crumbling long-distance relationship. English bleeds into French mid-sentence, and in both languages the prose bubbles up into short lines of poetry. The South Buffalo-born Joyce will be joined with music by Ahavaraba in the quaint cellar at the 9th Ward.  

Karen Tei Yamashita’s book I Hotel (finalist for the 2010 National Book Award) is the kind of ambitious, experimental project that few authors have the courage or patience to take on. Comprised of 10 novellas and over 600 pages long, the book delves into Asian Pacific American history and the birth of ethnic studies on the west coast, with interlocking stories centered at San Francisco’s International Hotel, a symbol of APA activism during from the late 1960s through the 70s. Yamashita, a Japanese-American author born in Oakland, combines rigorous research with elements of magical realism in novels, stories, and plays that explore issues of national and ethnic identity. She was among the first to explore the experience of the large Japanese immigrant population in Brazil in her first two novels,Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Brazil-Maru (1992), while Tropic of Orange (1997) explores her experience moving back to Los Angeles from Brazil during the mid-1980s. In The Circle K Cycles (2001), meanwhile, Yamashita focuses on Japanese-Brazilians who return to Japan to find work, and the collection makes use of snapshots, ads, and graphics to resemble a hybrid short story sequence melded with a memoir-scrapbook. Yamashita teaches literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.