Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto (Hardcover)

Fiction - Short Stories - Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology 

RELEASE DATE: 8/29/2023 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood.

"A knockout. Eleven knockouts, one KO for every story."-Elizabeth McCracken
"A stunning debut."-Laura van den Berg
"Throbs with searing talent."-Kali Fajardo-Anstine
"As exquisite as it is terrifying."-Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.

A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

Author Bio: 

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. She lives in Honolulu.

“Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is a sensory and visceral exploration of womanhood and Hawaiian culture, both ancient and new. In a collection where history and the present touch, the prose reads as if each sentence is reaching into turquoise waters and pulling out glimmering shells of truth. Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s debut throbs with searing talent.” —Kali Fajardo-Anstine, bestselling author of Woman of Light and Sabrina & Corina

“Lyrical collisions of superstition, folktales, and modern Hawaiian culture saving itself in the face of cliches. Desire and confusion are rarely far apart in these powerful coming-of-age stories that prove ‘it is possible to be many things, all the time, all at once.’” —Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories and Sing to It