Asian/American

Item Description

The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt transports us to San Francisco in the early 1980s, a magical, fog-shrouded city suffused—as are many of its denizens—with possibility and restless energy. In A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity, Whitney Otto’s charac-ters congregate night after night at a North Beach bar called the Youki Singe Tea Room, their lives conjoined by the bonds of friendship and shared experience. At the Youki Singe, the stories of these young people’s lives—their parties, their eccentric living situations, their passions for books and art and one another—are recorded in one patron’s “pillow book,” her version of the intimate journals of the courtesans of Edo Japan. Meanwhile, though, the careless joys of the drifting life are giving way to a desire to find something more substantial, a need to belong to something or someone.

Illustrated with more than two dozen beautifully reproduced woodblock prints, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity conjures an atmosphere both dreamy and contemporary. Whitney Otto engages the senses as well as the mind while exploring the intricacies, the trouble, and the rapture of human connection.

The bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt experiments again with a patchwork narrative, building an elaborate, piquant story of the loves and lives of a group of young 1980s San Franciscans around a series of 18th-century woodblock prints that depict the women of Edo, Japan.,,Against the backdrop of a North Beach fringe bar, the Youki Singe Tea Room, dozens of Otto's expertly tailored characters drink, adjust and readjust their senses of loneliness, acceptance and desire in a series of short vignettes.

Used - Like New, with dust jacket. Illustrated

Published 2002.  304 pages. 5.83 x 1.17 x 7.81"  Hardback

Item Special Note

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