Can I read Lester Higata's 20th Century (Iowa Short Fiction Award Book 2010) on EtoBox?

Lester Higata's 20th Century (Iowa Short Fiction Award Book 2010) by Barbara Hamby is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Lester Higata's 20th Century (Iowa Short Fiction Award Book 2010) about?

"Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids." Thus begins Barbara Hamby's magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. The quietly beautiful linked stories in Lester Higata's 20th Century bring us close to people who could be, and should be, our friends and neighbors and families. Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing backward in time throughout his life with his wife, Katherine, and their children in Hawai'i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1946, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby recreates not just one but any number of the worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine's mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his own; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata's 20th

Who reads Lester Higata's 20th Century (Iowa Short Fiction Award Book 2010)?

Author

Barbara Hamby

Publisher

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press

Published

2010

Language

EN

ISBN

9781587299186

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction

Rating

4.17 / 5 (24 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13