R Zamora Linmark NEWS
Before the Young Adult became the edgy, best-selling genre it is today, Kaya Press was publishing cutting edge stories about Asian diasporic young people that changed the world. R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling The Rs tells the stories of young people in Kalihi, Hawaii in a way that no one had ever allowed children to exist […]
On May 29th our beloved Kaya author, R. Zamora Linmark, sat down with Michel Martin (host of NPR’s All Things Considered) to discuss his lasting 90’s debut novel, Rolling the R’s! We’re obviously big fans of Rolling over here at the Kaya Press office (especially since it still stands as one of our all time […]
Rolling the R’s: 20th Anniversary Edition
“Whenever I return to Rolling the R’s, I end up wetting my own pants. What a wonderful book. Twenty-years later… and I’m still laughing.” –– Paul Beatty
When R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s was first published, it ushered a stunning new voice into American literature. In midst of the culture wars, when the prevailing immigrant narrative portrayed success against the odds, Rolling the R’s talked about queer, working class kids dreaming of pop stardom, fighting to imagine a place for themselves in an unforgiving world. Born of radical possibility, there is no novel like it today.
Set in the 1970s in the small town of Kalihi, Honolulu, Rolling the R’s animates the hilarious, disturbing, and chaotic misadventures of a group of Filipino, Vietnamese, Okinawan, and haole fifth graders. As they grapple with their burgeoning identities against a backdrop of Donna Summer’s disco anthems, Farrah Fawcett mania, Scott Baio dreams, their stories unfold largely in the documentary detritus of their lives—their poems and prayers, book reports, and teacher evaluations—all written in carefully observed, pitch-perfect vernacular.
Linmark’s experiments in narrative structure, pidgin, and poly-vocal storytelling sheds new light on the trauma of assimilation. Rolling the R’s challenges the conventions of “coming of age” and “coming out” narratives to reveal spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Eve Sedgewick described, “Daring and delicate… created out of the necessities of queer self-formation in an atmosphere of violence and dispossession.”
This special twentieth anniversary edition of Rolling the Rs features an updated cover and a new afterword by the author, which reveals the genesis of one of the most original and iconic novels of the Asian diasporic experience to its next generation of readers.
R Zamora Linmark NEWS
Before the Young Adult became the edgy, best-selling genre it is today, Kaya Press was publishing cutting edge stories about Asian diasporic young people that changed the world. R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling The Rs tells the stories of young people in Kalihi, Hawaii in a way that no one had ever allowed children to exist […]
On May 29th our beloved Kaya author, R. Zamora Linmark, sat down with Michel Martin (host of NPR’s All Things Considered) to discuss his lasting 90’s debut novel, Rolling the R’s! We’re obviously big fans of Rolling over here at the Kaya Press office (especially since it still stands as one of our all time […]
