Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare

Stories

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• eBook ISBN:
  9781639731176
• Year: 2023

USA Today Bestseller
A Debutiful "Best Debuts of the Year"
"Rich and wise, humming with confidence." — New York Times Book Review
"A knockout. Eleven knockouts. One KO for every story."—Elizabeth McCracken
" Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is a frontrunner for Book of the Year." — Debutiful

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection presents 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• A Catalogue of Kānaka Superstitions, as Told by Your Mother
• Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
• Story of Men
• Temporary Dwellers
• Madwomen
• Ms. Amelia’s Salon for Women in Charge
• Hotel Molokai
• Aiko, the Writer
• Some Things I Know About Elvis
• Touch Me Like One of Your Island Girls: A Love Story
• The Love and Decline of the Corpse Flower
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Author
• Copyright