Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Kakimoto, Megan Kamalei
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Books

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare -- Megan Kamalei Kakimoto - Hardcover


Indie Next Pick

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: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 08/29/2023
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.45h x 5.82w x 0.96d
ISBN: 9781639731169

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 06/12/2023
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2023
Booklist 08/01/2023 pg. 22

About the Author
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.