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The Hawaiʻi Review of Books, Honolulu, HI (2025)

01/30/2025

As we end this first month of the new year (and leave 2024 behind in our dashcams), Hawai‘i’s writing scene has never been stronger.

We have the receipts: a recent string of great books, a flourishing of new voices and persevering veterans, a major article in The New York Times by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto summing up a moment that can honestly be called a breakthrough, the first-ever Hobolulu Book Awards from Honolulu Magazine, at least four splendid anthologies, a couple of new publishing ventures that we know of (and undoubtedly more that we don’t), the continued excellence of stalwarts DaShop, Bess Press, Mutual Publishing and Bamboo Ridge—and a lot more.

Last year’s lit was lit. So let’s hear it for 2024 one more time. As for 2025, well, we know one thing for sure: The Hawaiʻi Review of Books is coming up on its fourth anniversary.

That means you will see poetry from Wing Tek Lum’s new book about Chinatown, Mark Panek on the marvel of the Hawaiian steel guitar, an interview by Susan Essoyan of Virginia Loo about HOW TO B, her memoir of single motherhood in Hawai‘i, Lee Tonouchi’s lost 2009 academic paper on pidgin and hip-hop, an introduction to the work of rising pidgin writer and rapper Thomas Iannucci, Perry Arrasmith on a Joan Didion island-writing doppleganger, and more.

The Hawai‘I Review of Books was born back in the fall of 2020 when editor Don Wallace watched pages shrink and coverage dwindle or vanish in our island media. It was more than books not being reviewed. It was everything—film, art, music, theater, even food—along with creative commentary on island life and politics. We started up with the idea that in a few years there might not be a general interest publication out there to cover this stuff. That day hasn’t quite come to pass, but it’s very close to reality.

Keep in touch. Be like MOANA screenwriter Aaron Kandell and filmmakee Zoë Eisenberg discussing creativity, volcanic eruptions, and equally powerful female friendships: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/women-just-wanna-have-lives

01/24/2025

The night before Christmas.

That’s when THROB published Alan Brennert’s short fiction “Kaimano,” a conjecture and conjure story about the death of Father Damien worthy of The Twilight Zone, a show Brennert wrote for in its rebooted incarnation. The story is stately, measured, respectful and yet expansive, taking liberties as fiction is wont to do, as good fiction must.

The response was strong and immediate and positive. “Thank you for reminding me again of Kalaupapa,” wrote one writer, who certainly needed no reminding, having herself written characters who were condemned to this majestic setting of disfiguring disease and societal abandonment.

We think she was saying you can never write enough about certain times and events. Because to remember is to honor. But also because we can write to incite—to engender—empathy, which has become an endangered species in the White House and Congress.

Here, the very existence of Hawai‘i regional literature and its diaspora connects us to the greater Pasifika, Pacific Rim, Asian and immigrant worlds. Our place as a colonial clearing house for immigration means our story is always repeating or echoing in some form or other around the globe.

That’s why there’s an ongoing THROB series of Hawai‘i Historic Fiction of which “Kamaino” is the second entry. We started it because we read the genre ourselves and appreciate that one of fiction’s special powers—and its charter—is to evoke in the fullness of life those who came before. Our first entry was Patrick Moser’s “The Fatal Surf Lesson,” about a true turning point in what would become a tourist onslaught.

As we wrote back when about Moser’s speculative re-creation, we hope the Historic Fiction series will “stimulate local and Hawai‘i-centric writers to take back their history from the slapdash appropriations of authors to whom the Islands are merely ‘material.’” Future Historic Fictions are coming from Lono Waiwaiole, Scott Kikkawa, THROB editor Don Wallace, and others.

Read “Kaimano” by Alan Brennert (and more!) at The Hawaiʻi Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/kamiano

12/21/2024

A few random songs, of a particular torchy, whiny variety, repeatedly surfaced night and day as we avoided, revisited, and digested the election results last month.

One was "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis (she/her), which debuted in January 1963, just after the world emerged from the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962).

By then, Hawaiʻi Review of Books editor Don Wallace's basement rec room/music studio doubled as a bomb shelter stacked with tinned sardines (terrible for the acoustics). There was a bullseye map of Long Beach on the wall showing blast radius rings from prime targets for Soviet ICBMs. They were toast.

The song's full refrain—"Don’t They Know It’s the End of the World"—invokes the indifference of others to the singer's heartbreak. But back then it also doubled as a commentary of the people going on about our lives as the seconds clicked off the Doomsday Clock.

Now, today, we know objectively that the world won't end January 20. For people in Gaza, yes, the world has been ending. As it has been in Ukraine, in Chad and the Sudan, in China if you're Uyghur. In Somalia and Congo it's been ending off and on for 30 years.

Instead, here we have our community, we have our families, assigned and chosen, we have our poetry. We have grassroots politics and city and state politics that require reform and our attention. We can count ourselves safe, lucky we live Hawai‘i, if we are among those able to do so, and then we can get back to work making Hawai‘i and the world a better place.

To that end, here at THROB we'll start by celebrating a poet, Kai Gaspar, who kind of grew up at the end of the world—in a village off the grid in South Kona—and whose life and work embody the kind of freedoms that are under direct attack these days. The occasion is the one-year anniversary of the publication of his poetic memoir, ULU, the debut volume from Hoʻolana Publishing.

Read "Long Kine Lei" now at hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/long-kine-lei.

And bon courage, as they say.

10/22/2024

It hasn't really been so long since Kiana Davenport changed the literary landscape of Hawai‘i with SHARK DIALOGUES, published in 1994. She introduced readers both inside and outside the Islands to an unfamiliar, multi-braided, international-inflected, female- and kanaka-centered storyline emanating from under the volcano's peak that dominates the Big Island.

It was a hit for all the right reasons. Best of all, for writers from and of Hawai‘i, SHARK DIALOGUES and its sequels, SONG OF EXILES (1999) and the bestseller HOUSE OF MANY GODS (2006), felt liberating. They said: Go ahead. From here you can write about anything, your way, obeying no one's guardrails, relying on your own experience and vision.

Davenport's novels gave writers room. They showed modern local life here and abroad. Trapped in timeless Hilo, a reader could see herself in Paris, Shanghai, New York. I can go there, too. In words as in life. And yet, big as they are, the books are grounded in people, recognizable characters of the Big Island, Nānākuli, Kalihi, China, and Korea, their matriarchs and mixed-race children. People who, no matter how far they've strayed, or how deep they've sunk, know they still do have a home here (however traumatic the thought) in Hawai‘i.

SNOWS OF MAUNA KEA, Davenport’s fourth novel in the series, is finally almost here. The title of course echoes the famous Ernest Hemingway short story—the one with the famous line about the carcass of a frozen leopard found near the 19,000-foot summit of Kenya's holy mountain, "The House of the Gods," Kilimanjaro. Davenport's wry wit is apparent in her sly transplanting of Kilimanjaro to Mauna Kea, another holy mountain brooding above a land traduced by colonialism, violated by thrill-seekers.

SNOWS OF MAUNA KEA is Davenport's great hike to the summit. To keep her company as she prepares the final version of the manuscript, bucking the current climate for smaller stories, fewer characters, less glory, let's savor this first taste and cheer her on.

Read a preview of SNOWS OF MAUNA KEA, and more, in The Hawaiʻi Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/snows-of-mauna-kea

08/09/2024

For those who’ve been waiting to read more of Kristiana Kahakauwila after her revelatory 2013 breakthrough THIS IS PARADISE, her middle-grad novel, CLAIRBOYANCE (HarperCollins), a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection, may feel like a bit of a curveball. But coming from a new mother and a human in full, the book, with its portraits of the young whose youthful plumage is in mid-molt, feels perfect and welcome.

As reviewer Kelly Murashige points out, Kahakauwila's story offers a safe zone for the tweeners in today's anxiety-ridden, socially pressured world. It imparts some all-important wisdom: be careful what you wish for...

Kids need landing places and stair-steps as they read their way into the world. And authors often need to recreate the magic of childhood to refresh their own wells of inspiration. Kahahauwila joins authors from Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood to T.S. Eliot to the master of them all, Robert Louis Stevenson, in making memorable children's lit.

As does Murashige, whose debut YA novel, THE LOST SOULS OF BENZAITEN (Soho Teen), just came out July 23. Because Kahakauwila is going to review it in a later THROB, we'll just say that there's a gorgeous sensibility and emotional precision here—Murashige's characters definitely got throb—and also a devilish wit, as evidenced by a main character who's a robot vacuum cleaner. Talk about the internet of things!

Read Murashige's review, only at the Hawai‘i Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/where-the-wild-thinks-are

07/30/2024

Paul Theroux's BURMA SAHIB (HarperCollins) was recently chosen by John Irving in The New York Times as one of the best books of the 21st century. It's a story that, as reviewer Christopher West Davis details, does double duty. It's the story of the birth of a writer in one callow youth, Eric Blair, posted to Myanmar (then Burma) as a junior grade British colonial administrator. As Blair goes through the stages of the birth of conscience at the appalling fact of colonialism, he grows an alter ego—a chap named George. Who has things to say.

Read the review to see how this invention of "George Orwell" takes place, but, also, as Davis points out, how Theroux fits himself and his own extensive experience, voyaging through the outposts and abbatoirs of empire, into the narrative. Novelists and short story writers are too easily read as transcribing their own autobiographies. But that's not what Theroux is doing.

Read Christopher West Davis' review of BURMA SAHIB by Paul Theroux only at The Hawaiʻi Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/therouxs-close-shave

07/09/2024

The rise and embrace of Koreans and their culture in the U.S. is one of the more highly visible and frankly eye-popping phenomena of recent years. In the American wholesale embrace of certain fetishized products, from kimchi to K-Pop to the late-state cutthroat capitalism of SQUID GAMES and PARASITE to facial serum, this moment has echoes of The British Invasion, which gave us those loveable mop-tops and their music, miniskirts, fish and chips, scones, Yardley white lipstick, the Mini, Burberry plaid, and so on. Plus an irritating abdication to anyone with an Oxbridge accent, especially editors and writers who infested New York in the 1980s and '90s.

If you're not comfortably British, sometimes the warm and fuzzy cultural embrace leaves out the actual people who already face economic, linguistic, racial and cultural hurdles. Who must carry the burden of representation as well as of their family's expectations.

No wonder why so many Korean-Americans, including Margaret Juhae Lee and Hyeseung Song—as well as our own indefatigable THROB correspondent Stephanie Han, whose idea it was to put Lee and Song together for a dialogue—end up as writers. You're already spending much of your time sorting out all these tangled threads and emotions; might as well set it down for the next gen.

Margaret Juhae Lee and Hyeseung Song both grew up in that perplexing and climatically challenged conurbation called Bayou City, Space City, We Have a Problem. That's right: Houston.

Both Lee and Song also have unusually complex and thoughtful memoirs out right now—Lee's STARRY FIELD as of last March, Song's DOCILE pubbing July 16—and we're excited to host their candid and surgically precise conversation about their search for identity and, in Lee's case, lost family history back in Korea.

Read their conversation, as well as excerpts from both their books, with The Hawaiʻi Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/straight-outta-houston

07/02/2024

Mark Panek's latest story in THROB, "Sumo’s Unsung Hawaiian Hero," celebrates the life of professional sumotori George Kalima, a.k.a. Yamato, who passed away this year in Tokyo.

Panek first met Kalima 26 years ago while researching his acclaimed biography of Waimanalo's Chad Rowan, GAIJIN YOKOZUNA. Bonded by their deep connections to the Land of the Rising Sun, the two became lifelong friends, with Kalima also contributing priceless cultural insight into Panek's award-winning BIG HAPPINESS, a biography of sumotori Percy Kipapa.

Panek went back for Kalima's memorial service, but even before he left was shocked at how Kalima had faded from memory—and how important his influence was, though his career never reached full flower due to illness and injury. He wrote the following tribute as a way of adding a refrain to Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's "Tengoku Kara Kaminari," which name checks Hawaiian sumo wrestlers: "And Yamato!"

Kalima was only 54 when he died in January, but as Panek writes, he made choices that assured his post-sumo life would be happy and fulfilled, by winning with another kind of ring—marriage.

Read Mark Panek's "Sumo’s Unsung Hawaiian Hero" and more at the Hawai‘i Review of Books: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/sumos-unsung-hawaiian-hero

06/18/2024

Before Duke Kahanamoku there was George Freeth, Hawai‘i's first great modern waterman, whose legacy is much less well-known. Dapper, personable and, crucially, light-skinned, he arrived on the scene in the 1900s to help create what would one day be known—and studied by academics like author Patrick Moser, a professor at Drury University—as Beach Culture.

Carving the tracks for future Beach Culture boys and girls, and men and women, to follow, Freeth changed the course of surfing and lifesaving. Moser chronicled Freeth's short life of celebrity and calculated ambiguity in two books, and now he's written a novel, EULOGY FOR A WATERMAN, which imagines Freeth's days, including where, ironically, his legacy probably looms largest: Southern California. Spotted surfing in 1907 by billionaire Henry Huntington at Redondo Beach, Freeth picked up the first surf sponsorship and became known as "the man who walked on water."

Later he became a lifeguard and is credited with professionalizing the service, but even more so for his lifesaving feats, including rescuing seven Japanese fishermen by racing out to the tip of Santa Monica Pier, diving in, taking them to shore, and racing back out to the tip of the pier and diving in all over again. He was credited with more than 200 rescues in his career.

In this excerpt, however, we skip ahead to the end of Freeth's short life, dying young at 35 from complications of the Spanish influenza, recalling the tragedy of his youth, old Hawai‘i, San Francisco, and the splendors of the Hawaiian Kingdom before the Overthrow.

EULOGY FOR A WATERMAN is the first in an ongoing series of Hawai‘i Historic Fictions that will be running in THROB with the hope that they will stimulate local and Hawai‘i-centric writers to take back their history from the slapdash appropriations of authors to whom the Islands are merely "material."

Read an excerpt from EULOGY FOR A WATERMAN by Patrick Moser online: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/eulogy-for-a-waterman

05/08/2024

New at THROB: Jeffrey Higa expounds on the benefits of writing short with an essay on the novellas of Steven Millhauser.

Higa pitched his story just as a kind of novella mania swept the literary airwaves and other pixelated media. Suddenly people were proclaiming the *incredible* shortness of the novella. Despite a suspicion that this was a publishing ploy to get us to all write shorter books, the truth could not be denied: novellas ARE cool. Higa's essay insists Millhauser's are coolest.

Who's Millhauser, you may ask? Well, he's a secret passion of a lot of writers, including our own Don Wallace. "I can learn from this guy," Wallace remembers thinking after reading a story of his. "His writing feels free of fear of judgment but also of obedience to norms." Someone worth emulating for his cleanness of attack, Millhauser builds a story sentence by grounded sentence, then surprises by taking flight.

Higa's essay is another demonstration of his range and mastery. Check it out at hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/novellas-are-better

05/01/2024

April is a taxing month, reason enough to ponder our mortality. (That it's also cruel enough to inflict puns seems utterly gratuitous.)

Fortunately we have Thomas Farber to help with an excerpt from his book PENULTIMATES: THE NOW & THE NOT-YET. Farber's work combines tightness of prose and spaciousness of thought—but he's a hard act to follow, as THROB Editor Don Wallace discovered while doing the excerpt.

The difficulty was how to capture the spirit of Farber's wide-ranging yet sparse entries in PENULTIMATES, which is a kind of Journal of Last Days. After flagging chapters that might work as standalone pieces, Wallace took a look at the book's Acknowledgements. Wouldn’t you know it, the two were already taken by THE SURFER'S JOURNAL.

Starting over, Wallace realized what most affected him about the book was Farber's stance regarding the end. He faces death, even su***de, all the while wryly appreciating the trivialities alongside the terrors and beauties of life.

"This is how I first encountered his work, when my sister pressed his remarkable THE FACE OF THE DEEP on me. A book about the oceanic abyss as well as the human one, it caught and focused Anne's attention after a harrowing cancer survival," Wallace says. "This is what keeps me going, she said. The book was a sea anchor for her emotions, so they wouldn't drag her under before she took care of business."

THROB is always happy to publish Thomas Farber. He helps us to step outside our own lives and to see.

See for yourself: Read an excerpt from Farber's PENULTIMATES at hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/are-we-there-yet

03/13/2024

Tom Gammarino shares his takeaways on writing, running, and bloody knees from that "prolific, world-famous brain" we've all read and loved, and perhaps even glimpsed on the streets and green fields of Honolulu: Haruki Murakami.

Like one of the fabled escaped wallabies of upper Mānoa Valley, that Murakami. But through luck and kismet, Gammarino gets ever closer to his literary quarry, all the while wondering: "What do I say to him?" All we can say, from our many flubbed encounters with fame-gilded word wingers, is be careful what you wish for.

Read it here! https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/running-with-haruki-murakami

03/11/2024

The problem with being a "third culture kid" when languages aren't handed down is the subject of Grace Loh Prasad's new book, THE TRANSLATOR'S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, recently out from Ohio State University Press. It's a topic many in Hawai‘i will find familiar, only, in Prasad's case, the typical role of child translating the new English-speaking culture of the U.S. to immigrant parents was reversed by her globe-trotting polyglot father's job as a translator: Grace was usually the odd one out.

In her essay "Becoming the Translator's Daughter," Prasad traces her process of discovery of the limitations of her upbringing even as she understands their origin in the deep affection and care of her father. She also brings to light the fascinating publishing empire her father worked for, one that few have ever heard about.

Read it here! https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/becoming-the-translators-daughter

01/31/2024

Zoë Eisenberg's significant debut novel, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS, is a story of a pod of no-longer-young, not quite settled thirtysomething friends—two women and a man, who's the twin of one of the women—living under the same roof. Working the cringeworthy jobs available in a tourist-industry state—or helping to sell off paradise to newcomers—they barely navigate an unconventional ‘ohana riven by passive-aggressive energy. Can anything change their lives before they stale out, dissolve in alcohol and/or meaningless hookups?

Coming at a time when "throuple" and "polyamory" have entered the conversational jetstream as fodder for gossip, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS takes a look at a reality many young women, and more and more of us in Hawai‘i, must face: a world of closer, tighter living arrangements based on financial necessity, inertia, old but frayed family ties or friendships, but also on a desire to create a new kind of family.

This is a book of precise observations and memorable language in service of an actual philosophical view of the way we live and love now, as opposed to the often shoddily constructed fictions foisted on the marketplace. Experience it for yourself and read two consecutive sections from SIGNIFICANT OTHERS in THROB:

https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/significant-others

12/31/2023

There's never been a year remotely like 2023 for Hawai‘i, in terms of books. Local authors published by mainstream houses or a big indie gave us four strong novels, a shockingly good story collection, and an acute Hawaiian diaspora memoir.

What's collectively thrilling is the solid literary accomplishment each of the books represents in language, voice, subject matter, authorial chops, and courage. Full credit goes to them, our authors. These are books that don't mince words, back down, or coast on popular political formulas. They dive deep and share with us their unflinching gaze at what they find under the surface of our lives here. They risk making us uncomfortable while ravishing us with their imaginations.

Learn about them at https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/2023-was-hawaiis-breakout-book-year

And, if you haven't done so already, go out now and buy books. Buy them all.

12/09/2023

After reading Chris McKinney's Water City Trilogy, a sci-fi triptych out of Hieronymus Bosch, you may never look at your phone the same way again.

A powerful parable about the illusion of free will and the poison of ego couched in a fast-paced, wisecrack-filled detective story, the novels jolly you along the road to environmental and technological disaster. It’s a swell ride, exhilarating, the prose crackling. Time and again, though, McKinney is waiting around the corner to stick you with a shiv.

The series does what the best sci-fi does, fast-forwarding our rapture at evolving technologies, including Silicon Valley's current "life extension" dream of living forever. It incorporates our species' gullibility over messianic figures and narratives.

As an kamaʻāina bonus, it also laughs at our pretensions. Or at least those of all the business-booster Hawai‘i politicians and economic experts who've prophesied for decades that these Islands would one day be the center of the Pacific Rim. Well, McKinney makes it happen, folks. At the start of the first book, we're Water City, the undersea hub of the world. A world at peace, unified, harmonious. Big whoop!

Because as we find out in that first book, MIDNIGHT, WATER CITY, there is no memory of Hawai‘i and no Native Hawaiians. In 2142, everyone lives in "sea scrapers" deep below the waves to escape climate change. In fact, there's hardly any above-ground population at all, other than the jet-setting rich; a serene maternal scientist who rules the world like Prospero, granting those rich a way to double their lifespans; and a toxic dump that used to be the American Midwest full of Mad Max mutants who just love that pollution.

If this is what utopia looks like…

In MIDNIGHT the clock strikes doom for 40 years of peace. The second book, EVENTIDE, WATER CITY, which came out this summer, chronicles the aftermath of the global disaster that kicks off in Water City, a.k.a. Hawai‘i. And now here comes the endgame, SUNSET, WATER CITY, the third and final volume from Soho Press, publishing December 9.

Read THROB editor Don Wallace's review online at https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/eventide-water-city-excerpt

12/02/2023

The holidays are a time to come together. Here are two opportunities to do so!

From 3 to 5 p.m. tomorrow (Dec. 2), meet author Chris McKinney with a special signing and party at DaShop.hnl celebrating the launch of SUNSET, WATER CITY, the third book of his Water City Trilogy.

From 2 to 4 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 9, join Bamboo Ridge Press for the launch of their 45th Anniversary issue, featuring dozens of stories by local writers. (It's a big one!)

Two great nights coming up—just be sure to preorder your books for signing and RSVP for your spot at the party. See you at Da Shop!

11/28/2023

"The Child is the Father of the Fantasy" is a review of ISABELLA'S DAUGHTER by Pat Matsueda, managing editor of MĀNOA. Author Angela Nishimoto calls her work a "literary romance" but it skews a lot darker given its subject of a private school teacher's seduction of a student. As the title hints, the girl is pursued for who she is—the child of the teacher's obsession in high school. It's a real double-whammy that cleverly inverts the Lo**ta strategy by Nabokov's Humbert Humbert.

The subject matter is the bravery here. Sexual abuse by teachers, coaches, counselors, administrators and staff is a constant in Hawai‘i schools, not that you'll ever hear much about it. Nishimoto, a recently retired botany teacher who has published more than 40 pieces of poetry and prose, convincingly creates the kind of institution where this happens—and the Hawai‘i where it’s swept under the lauhala floor mat.

Read it online—https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/the-child-is-the-father-of-the-fantasy

The Hawaiʻi Review of Books