Author Kimiko Guthrie above holding Block Seventeen which will be available in the near future.
Co-Artistic Director Kimiko Guthrie’s debut novel is officially avail for your to purchase; and take a look at this great review here.
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Block Seventeen was just selected as an Editor’s Personal Pick for June by Audible Books!
And it’s also on these June lists:
The Chicago Review of Books includes BLOCK SEVENTEEN in their 10 Must Read Books This June roundup. Check it out here.
Ms. Magazine includes BLOCK SEVENTEEN in their “June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us” go ahead and give it a read.
Bustle includes BLOCK SEVENTEEN in their Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020 Check it out!
Pop Sugar includes BLOCK SEVENTEEN in their Best Books of June: Don’t miss it!
BookBub includes BLOCK SEVENTEEN in their 23 of the Best Book Club Books of the Summer make sure you check it out here.
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Growing up, I always thought “Camp” was a summer camp my and other Japanese families had been allowed to attend for free; my family spoke about memories of their WWII internment with a confusing lightness. I spent much of my adulthood looking for a novel that captured my own experience growing up with vague hints of this distant, repressed trauma peeping in now and then. But all the novels I found on the subject, however poignant, seemed to package the story mostly in the past–a chapter of history that we must not forget, but that is more or less over. Block Seventeen is my attempt at connecting themes of Camp to today’s surveillance-frenzied, technology-saturated world.
When a Japanese-American pregnant mother stoops over a bathtub and burns a small statue of Jizo Bodhisatva—a deity that’s said to protect the spirits of babies—on leaving for an internment camp during WWII, a dark momentum is set in motion. Fast forward to 2011 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we meet Akiko “Jane” Thompson, an unemployed, thirtysomething, half-Japanese/half-Caucasian woman as she is confounded by a series of disturbing mysteries: Why won’t the neighbor’s baby, whom she’s never seen, stop crying? Why is her boyfriend, who works for the Transportation Security Administration, suddenly obsessed, to the point of paranoia, with government surveillance? And why can she only find her mother online, in the elusive world of social media?
Inspired by Japanese folklore, Haruki Murakami’s intermingling of the mundane and the supernatural, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s play between trauma and denial, Block Seventeen explores memory, the ambivalences of modern technology and its effect on the fragility of human relationships, as well as the difficulties of distinguishing fact from fiction in the 21st century.
–Kimiko Guthrie
Block Seventeen written by Kimiko Guthrie.
Block Seventeen is scheduled to be published in June 2020. Check out Kimiko’s website for more info HERE