Author(s): Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Short Stories | USA | The Pacific

A stunning collection of stories that weaves Hawaiian mythology with a vivid fabulism and rich sense of place.

Description: In Hawaii, a cast of women reckon with physical and emotional alienation, and the toll it takes on their psyches. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (boar) on the haunted Pali highway portends one woman's increasingly fraught relationship with her body during pregnancy. A woman recalls an uncanny experience, in which Elvis impersonators take centre stage, to an acquaintance who doesn't yet know just how intimately they're connected. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in the giant corpse flower a mourner has gifted her.

Centering native Hawaiian identity, and how it unfolds in the lives, mind and bodies of kanaka women, the stories in Kakimoto's debut collection are speculative and uncanny, exploring themes of queerness, colonization and desire. Both a fierce love letter to mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory simmering with tension, Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare takes seriously the superstitions born of the islands. Kakimoto's characters seek pleasure and purpose even in absurd circumstances, often with a surprising sense of humor, and her stories treat Hawai'i as so much more than a postcard from paradise.

Review: In Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare, the enormously talented Megan Kakimoto gives us her Hawai'i, as bright as blood, as dark as blood. It's a book about beauty and brutality, love and threat, home and estrangement, as original and fearless a book as I've read in years. It does not pull its punches; it's altogether a knockout. Eleven knockouts, one KO for every story -- Elizabeth McCracken, author of THE SOUVENIR MUSEUM
Kakimoto's bold and haunting stories are brilliant on the mysterious and potent languages of the body, and on the enduring power of the stories that shape us. Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is a stunning debut -- Laura van den Berg, author of I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS and THE THIRD HOTEL
Megan Kakimoto is an extraordinary writer - compassionate, insightful, fiercely funny and super-smart - and Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare thrums with intelligence, wisdom and wild originality. A tremendous debut by a writer who, lucky for us, has only just begun -- Molly Antopol, author of THE UNAMERICANS
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 SING TO IT
Megan Kakimoto is one of those rare writers who has mastered both story and sentence. The women in this story are audacious, resilient, and unforgettable-they have my whole heart -- Kimberly King Parsons, author of BLACK LIGHT

Author Biography: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a mixed-ethnicity writer of native Hawaiian and Japanese descent. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015 and is a Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where she is one of Elizabeth McCracken's mentees. Her work has been has been featured or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, Conjunctions, Joyland, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She also serves as an associate editor for Bat City Review. She has attended the Tin House Writers Workshop and her work has received support from The Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop.