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Episode 27: "I Hotel" by Karen Tei Yamashita, w/ special guest Josh Cook
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We’re joined today by Josh Cook. Josh is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is the author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder and most recently of The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, published by our friends at Biblioasis.
We chat about his work as well as I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press. Some words get thrown around a bit too often and are frequently misapplied. However, I Hotel is absolutely a masterpiece. To give any kind of synopsis is to do the book (and you) a disservice, but in a somewhat quixotic attempt at that: this is a novel comprised of novellas, all set in the San Francisco of the late 60s and early 70s exploring the revolutionary movements (political, cultural, artistic, romantic, and everything that makes life a dazzling experience) of that time and place. It’s a wide-ranging conversation and one we hope you’ll find as exciting and engaging as we did.
Books/authors mentioned (another curriculum for you!):
all of Yamashita’s other works (Tropic of Cancer is next up for Tom, he thinks)
Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit, translated by Daniel Hahn
Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
If you’d like to read a bit more about/from Yamashita, here’s a LitHub article Josh wrote “Why Everyone Should Read the Great Karen Tei Yamashita” and another LitHub article on the “The Craft of Writing” by Yamashita herself.
To hear more from Josh follow him on Instagram (@joshthelibromancer) and Bluesky (@joshthelibromancer), and follow Porter Square Books on Instagram (@porter_square_books), Bluesky (@portersqbooks), and Threads (@porter_square_books).
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Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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