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EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Speculative debut story collection about Hawaiian & Japanese culture and superstitions.

Set in Hawai'i, this speculative collection features a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and examines the ways in which physical and emotional alienation take a toll on their psyches. It centers native Hawaiian identity and how this identity unfolds in the lives, minds, and bodies of kanaka women, exploring themes of queerness, colonization, and desire. In the title story of EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE, a childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (boar) on the haunted P?li highway portends one woman's increasingly fraught relationship with her body during pregnancy; in "Some Things I Know About Elvis," a woman recalls an uncanny experience in which Elvis impersonators take center stage to an acquaintance who doesn't yet know just how intimately they're connected; and in "The Love and Decline of the Corpse Flower," an elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in the giant corpse flower a mourner has gifted her. Both a fierce love letter to kanaka women and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory simmering with tension, Megan Kakimoto's collection takes seriously the superstitions born of the islands. Her 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. Megan Kakimoto is a mixed-ethnicity writer of native Hawaiian and Japanese descent. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015 and is currently a Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where she is one of Elizabeth McCracken's mentees. Her work 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.

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Book Published 2023-08-29 by Bloomsbury

Comments

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.

Megan Kakimoto is one of those rare writers who has mastered both story and sentence. 'The Love and Decline of the Corpse Flower'-thick with grief, desire, and magic-teems with deft lyricism and poetic attention. The women in this story are audacious, resilient, and unforgettable-they have my whole heart.

In EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto explores with visceral precision the pains and the joys of the body. Shame and grief intermingle with tenderness and desire in these multilayered stories. This is an innovative, spectacular debut.

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: full of muscle and bone, sex, the body, corpse flowers, Night Marchers, the occasional Elvis impersonator. 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.

UK: Granta

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Kakimoto interweaves themes of sexual desire and fertility with Hawaiian mythology in her unflinching debut collection... Marked by a wry sense of humor and an unerring touch for the surreal, Kakimoto's stories add up to a powerful exploration of gender, class, race, colonialism, and domestic violence. This eloquent outing marks Kakimoto as a writer to watch.

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.

Megan Kamelei Kakimoto's collection blooms with opulent and tender language. She weaves an intimate and expansive worldview of Hawai?i as sacred, abundant, and thoroughly alive with ancestral stories. Kakimoto is one of Hawai?i's most brilliant new voices. The power of her monumental debut will reverberate across generations past and those yet to come.

These nervy, original stories are flat-out wonderful-a stellar debut.

Absorbing... Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection.

A gorgeous collection that contemplates ideas of womanhood, Hawaiian culture and identity, and how history shapes the present.

Told with sharp, lurid prose, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's stories of kanaka women put female agency, rage, and horror at the forefront, deftly interrogating the ways in which identity and inheritance can both haunt and liberate. An extraordinary debut collection that is as exquisite as it is terrifying.

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A writer receives a stern warning from a familial spirit. A widow forms a relationship with a corpse flower. A flailing mother copes by telling her son tales about The Madwoman in the Sea. 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.

In lush, gorgeous prose that startles and stirs, Kakimoto weaves eleven visceral and surreal stories about the body and desire, blood and inheritance, Hawaiian mythology and identity. A wholly original debut, EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE is everything I want in a collection: daring, big-hearted, electric, lyrical, and utterly unforgettable. In the opening story, a mother asks her daughter, 'My baby honey girl, don't you want to live?' This book is a resounding yes, all the fierce and relentless ways that these girls and women fight to live-and the ways they keep each other alive. We are lucky to live in the time of Megan Kamalei Kakimoto.

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.