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Tropic of Orange | 
 enlarge | Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $5.99
You Save: $10.01 (63%)
New (29) Used (25) Collectible (1) from $5.99
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 229591
Media: Paperback
Pages: 280
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1566890640
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781566890649
ASIN: 1566890640
Publication Date: September 1, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This fiercely satirical, semifantastical novel ... features an Asian-American television news executive, Emi, and a Latino newspaper reporter, Gabriel, who are so focused on chasing stories they almost don't notice that the world is falling apart all around them. Karen Tei Yamashita's staccato prose works well to evoke the frenetic breeziness and monumental self-absorption that are central to their lives.-Janet Kaye, The New York Times Book Review
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Movie in Waiting March 12, 1999
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Yamashita's book is just short of a tour de force. It's engrossing, jauntily satirical and multicultural to a fault. I agree with the other reviews that find it a direct indictment of materialism as well, but I was more intrigued by her apocalyptic vision for LA. The city of angels has always been a focal point for artists, and many think its time of burnout will come. Yamashita thinks that the destructive impulse will come from within and from nearby borders, and that makes this book even more fascinating as a possible scenario for the end of LA as we know it. Why hasn't this become a movie, or even a movie of the week? The fever pitch she manages to end chapters with at times would directly translate to the large or small screen. Maybe the Hollywood vultures haven't found her yet. It's only a matter of time.
a readable book taking a pessimistic view of materialism February 6, 1998
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Yamashita's book is an interesting study of the effects of technology on human interaction and emotion. She uses recent history to form her opinion: NAFTA is portrayed in a bad light as destroying tradition and spreading American materialism, and the Rodney King case makes the freeway assault seem not so much like fiction. The book is an easy read with a lot of thought-provoking symbolism, and it is also very pessimistic about 90's American culture. If it is seen purely as a worst-case scenario of the future of America, it is very effective. John Alexander Stiner
Awesome magical realism September 22, 2002
M. Bustamante (Lakewood, Ca)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I was assigned Tropic of Orange in a class and found myself totally engrossed in the scewed story lines. if you like books that make you stop and think, what the ... is going on here?! Then you will LOVE this book. Great criticism on the US, media and Los Angeles too!
 Best Book About LA Ever March 3, 2007
L. Anderson (Los Angeles)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Brilliant and beautiful! Definitely the best book about LA in the last ten years. Not your typical wannabe Hollywood drama or wild drug haze. This is the real Los Angeles. The structure is unlike anything I have ever seen in a book before. You can read it straight through, or follow the Hypertext and follow each of the seven characters through their own experience. The plot is simply extraordinary, with touches of magical realism and noir fiction; an orange growing directly on the Tropic of Cancer makes its way north, completely distrubpting everywhere between it and Los Angeles. Between the lines of the story is the complexities of culture and stereotypes in LA and the fragility of the town itself. Everyone should read this book!
Tropic of Orange as "borderlands" being born on Pacific Rim... March 26, 2008
Rob Wilson (Santa Cruz and Honolulu)
I reread Tropic of Orange and was amazed how its portrayal of LA all the more holds up in terms of the grids and forces the novel engages with via its crazed set of characters and criss-crossing emplottings and imaginative methods. In larger contexts of urban literature on the Pacific Rim, this reader admired the play of learning and fantasy to create an apocalyptic yet hopeful grid of crazed multicultural LA where the south bleeds into the north and vice versa creating inter-spaces and modes of adaptation combining old and new. Urban sublime for sure. It is more "borderlands" Latino/Asian CA than anything I could mention on the literary Rim; it's a feat, will outlast many novels that come and go with yesterday's news
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