<DIV><p>&#147;With humor and bite, [Yamashita] takes on waste, greed, stupidity, love, environmental and cultural apocalypse and the problems of migration and belonging&#151;achieving a kind of cross between Kobo Abe, Gabriel Garc&#237;a M&#225;rquez and Upton Sinclair.&#8221;&#151;<I>Star Tribune </I>(Minneapolis)</p> <p>Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America&#8217;s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco&#8217;s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, <I>I Hotel</I> begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.</p> <p>As Karen Yamashita&#8217;s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel&#151;epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement&#151;their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.</p><BR></DIV>