Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.
Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she’s called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.
Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.
Innehållsförteckning
Editorial Introduction
Fiction by Karen Tei Yamashita
’Mystery Spot’
’The Missing Testicles of Padre Q/Los Compañeros Ausentes del Padre Q’
’The Brother’s Parking Lot’
’Frutos Extraños’
’Quimosabe’
’This Is Someone’s Paradise’
’Santa Cruz Chinatown’
’Indian Summer’
’Midsummer Night’s Dream’
’Neverneverland’
Afterword
Santa Cruz Nori Coordinates
Mythographies
’801 Silver Avenue after Hom Wong Shee’ by Brandon Shimoda – San Francisco, CA
’(De)Tour of an Unincorporated Territory’ by Craig Santos Perez – Mongmong-Toto-Maite, Guam
’506 N. Evergreen Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90033’ by Sesshu Foster – Los Angeles, CA
’Navel, Bury’ by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint – Amherst, MA
’A Pale Persephone: On the Video Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’ by Angie Sijun Lou – New York, NY
’Whether the Border Looks Out from Eight Hundred and Fifty Eyes, or Two, the MBQ Remains Few Though on the Rise’ by Saretta Morgan – Sasabe, AZ
’After Silent Incantations, the Intertidal’ by Ronaldo V. Wilson – Berkeley, CA
’The Blue Plume’ by Juliana Spahr – Cheshire, OH
Dark Soil Coordinates
Om författaren
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.