Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare
Megan Kamalei KakimotoFrom major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity & 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 & sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian & Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom & the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality & generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise & 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 & knocking in the briefcase.
Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity & mythology, & a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.
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Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese & Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, & elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature & has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation & 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.