When people find out I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi (because they’ve asked where I’m from, because someone else has told them, because they’ve read something I’ve written or, most often, because I’ve handed them my Hawaiʻi driver’s license), I am met with one of two responses: “Why are you here?” or, inevitably, someone telling me about a past or future vacation.
It is extremely difficult for most people—most Americans—to conceive of Hawaiʻi and Oceania outside of an imperialist context. It is “paradise.” The far-off place where, if they’re lucky, they’ll vacation. But for me, my family, and so many others who call this place home, Hawaiʻi is where we’ve lived, worked, dreamed, and struggled for decades. Its history, and ours, is irreversibly tied to the mass extinction of Indigenous plants and animals, the military’s occupation and desecration of the ʻāina, and the continued displacement of kānaka from their Native land. That’s what I try to capture in my debut story collection Extinction Capital of the World.
As a Samoan-Haole settler, I was raised to view the land I lived on as more than a place. It is a member of my family, to be treated and cared for as such. This belief stems from my own Samoan ancestry and the Hawaiian cultural practices I was raised to respect. It bridges the modern separation between people and place addressed by Louise Erdrich in her essay “A Writer’s Sense of Place.” She asks: “How many of us come to know a place deeply, over generations?”
Place, to me—and to the other debuts included on this list—is not static or unfeeling. While there are many short story collections out there that circle a single place or region, these seven books are special because of how they treat place as a character to be known and loved across time. This relationship is not always an easy one, but the complications, and at times grief that this bond entails, enrich the human characters in these debuts. All published (or soon to be) within the last ten years, these collections speak to the power (and privilege) of the ability to stay in a place, the heartache of being forced to leave, and how, just as the people who leave a place change, places, too, change in our absence. From the Sunshine State to Colorado and the Pacific Northwest, each collection will ask you to see the places that grace their pages in a new light, through the eyes of those who deeply understand, care for, and, occasionally, come to resent them.
Philippines: In the Country by Mia Alvar
Mia Alvar’s National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize-winning collection, In The Country, is characterized by exile—of the characters who remain and live under martial law in 1970s and 80s Philippines, and of those who are forced to leave. There are tales of homecomings, stories of grief and regret. My favorite story, the titular novella, “In the Country,” follows a young nurse, Milagros, as she organizes a strike at Manila’s City Hospital, demanding that Filipino nurses be paid the same as their American counterparts; her political work results in a collapsing of roles—wife, daughter, mother, citizen—usually kept static by the boundaries of place that have crumbled under the country’s dictatorship. Though not all of Alvar’s stories are explicitly set in the Philippines, each center place in the hearts of her characters—across the board, In the Country deeply understands the complexity and grief of diaspora. Alvar’s debut is an ode to the places we come from and all the joys, struggles, and heartbreaks that home entails for those who leave and those who are left.
Houston, TX: Lot by Bryan Washington
I will read anything Bryan Washington writes. Forever and ever. Amen. His first book, Lot, a literary love letter to Washington’s hometown of Houston, tells the story of people who are often erased: the Jamaican sex worker in “Shepherd” who visits relatives in the city to distract from the death of her baby; the Greek chorus of residents from an apartment complex who tell the story of an ill-fated affair in “Alief;” the broke community college dropouts in “Bayou” who find a chupacabra. Washington’s stories are written for and about the working class, capturing a moment in time in a rapidly gentrifying city. Through following recurring and one-off characters as they navigate the landscape they call home, we, as readers, are forced to accept that, as much as we love the places we come from, sometimes, in order to survive, we have to leave them.
Colorado: Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
I read Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina nearly four years before I moved to Denver, and even now it haunts my experience of Colorado, and my larger understanding of my presence as a settler in the state. Fajardo-Anstine balances coming-of-age stories like “Sugar Babies”—where the anger and grief of a sixth grader is forced to the surface after the bag of sugar she and a boy in her class are caring for like an infant for home economics “dies”—with the sex work and violence against Indigenous women present in “Any Further West” and the titular story, “Sabrina & Corina.” Steeped in history, these stories span generations of women, documenting struggles, joys, and a deep connection to and love of the American West.
Florida: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
Revolving around the city and suburbs of Jacksonville, Milk Blood Heat is all you could want from a Florida book. It’s sticky, tragic, a little yearning, and animated by age old questions: What and who makes us who we are? Is it possible to become someone new? How can we take control of our lives in the face of our pasts, the people we love, and the systems of power that shape and subjugate our worlds? Some of my favorite stories from the collection include “Feast,” which follows a woman haunted by the body parts of her miscarried child; “Thicker Than Water,” about a woman who road trips to Santa Fe with her estranged brother and the ashes of her father; and the titular story, “Milk Blood Heat,” showing two adolescent girls as they strain against their burgeoning womanhood, mixing their blood into a bowl of milk that they then drink in an attempt to become blood sisters. I especially love how many of these stories portray the complicated, fully realized desires of women.
Hawaiʻi: Every Drop Is A Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
I’ve been in awe of Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s work ever since I read her story “Temporary Dwellers” in Qu Literary Magazine. Navigating the stickiness of envy and desire, the grief and callousness that comes from facing ever present atrocity, and the United States’ occupation and active military desecration of Hawaiian land, this story, like so many in Kakimoto’s collection, is a queer gut punch to the heart. Kakimoto has a way of showing women in all their real, messy grief, longing, and desire. There’s “The Love and the Decline of the Corpse Flower,” where the narrator finds her deceased wife blooming in the corpse flower that grows in their living room; “Aiko, The Writer,” in which Aiko breaks her grandmother’s rules to please her literary agent, and writes a manuscript about the kapu Night Marchers; and “Ms. Amelia’s Salon for Women in Charge,” where Kehaulani goes to a salon which only accepts personal traits as payment to get waxed in order to please her haole boyfriend. Throughout Every Drop Is A Man’s Nightmare, Kakimoto tells Hawaiʻi’s stories with compassion and honesty, rejecting mainstream media’s fantastical paradise for the lived reality of Hawaiians under settler colonial rule.
Newark, New Jersey: I’ll Give You A Reason by Annell Lopéz
Annell Lopéz’s collection is a masterclass in balancing public and private life in fiction. Digging deep into the mystery, hurt, and desire her characters don’t show to the world, Lopéz forces us to reckon with the privilege of our public personas, who we are when no one is watching, and whether or not the part we play every day is who we want to, or should, be. Lopéz’s love for the Ironbound and its people is fully realized, always circling what it means to live in, to love, and to be forced to leave a place. I love so many of these stories, but especially “Bear Hunting Season,” which follows a young widow, Nina, as she begins to date again after her husband’s death, bringing his ashes along with her as she meets new people; “So I Let Her Be,” where a daughter comforts her mom after her mom’s nude photos leak; and “The World As We Know It,” where a white couple’s call to Child Protective Services leads to what will become the deportation of their neighbors who live downstairs.
Seattle, Washington: Crawl by Max Delsohn
Max Delsohn’s darkly comic, yet tender portrait of 2010s Seattle follows transmasc characters as they navigate the trials and tribulations of living in a city hailed by many as radical queer utopia. From the feral glamping trip found in “18 or 34 Miles from Perennial Square,” to the narrator in “Sex Is A Leisure Activity,” who, after transitioning, finds himself increasingly attracted to other men. My favorite is “Moon Over Denny-Blaine,” which tracks the drama, politics, and ultimate solidarity found when a queer nude beach is overrun with straight people on Pride Sunday, Delsohn remains unafraid to show how the complicated reality of his characters’ lives belies the utopian veneer. The emotional range of Delsohn’s work is simply unmatched—these stories had me gasping, cackling, and, like all the best fiction, crying happy and sad tears.