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<\/a><\/p>\nIt is extremely difficult for most people\u2014most Americans\u2014to conceive of Hawai\u02bbi and Oceania outside of an imperialist context. It is \u201cparadise.\u201d The far-off place where, if they\u2019re lucky, they\u2019ll vacation. But for me, my family, and so many others who call this place home, Hawai\u02bbi is where we\u2019ve 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\u2019s occupation and desecration of the \u02bb\u0101ina, and the continued displacement of k\u0101naka from their Native land.\u00a0That\u2019s what I try to capture in my debut story collection\u00a0Extinction Capital of the World<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cA Writer\u2019s Sense of Place.\u201d She asks: \u201cHow many of us come to know a place deeply, over generations?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Place, to me\u2014and to the other debuts included on this list\u2014is 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.<\/p>\n Philippines: In the Country<\/a> by Mia Alvar\u00a0<\/p>\n Mia Alvar\u2019s National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize-winning collection, In The Country, is characterized by exile\u2014of 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, \u201cIn the Country,\u201d follows a young nurse, Milagros, as she organizes a strike at Manila\u2019s City Hospital, demanding that Filipino nurses be paid the same as their American counterparts; her political work results in a collapsing of roles\u2014wife, daughter, mother, citizen\u2014usually kept static by the boundaries of place that have crumbled under the country\u2019s dictatorship. Though not all of Alvar\u2019s stories are explicitly set in the Philippines, each center place in the hearts of her characters\u2014across the board, In the Country deeply understands the complexity and grief of diaspora. Alvar\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Houston, TX: Lot<\/a> by Bryan Washington\u00a0<\/p>\n I will read anything Bryan Washington writes. Forever and ever. Amen. His first book, Lot, a literary love letter to Washington\u2019s hometown of Houston, tells the story of people who are often erased: the Jamaican sex worker in \u201cShepherd\u201d 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 \u201cAlief;\u201d the broke community college dropouts in \u201cBayou\u201d who find a chupacabra. Washington\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Colorado: Sabrina & Corina<\/a> by Kali Fajardo-Anstine\u00a0<\/p>\n I read Kali Fajardo-Anstine\u2019s 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 \u201cSugar Babies\u201d\u2014where 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 \u201cdies\u201d\u2014with the sex work and violence against Indigenous women present in \u201cAny Further West\u201d and the titular story, \u201cSabrina & Corina.\u201d Steeped in history, these stories span generations of women, documenting struggles, joys, and a deep connection to and love of the American West.\u00a0<\/p>\n Florida: Milk Blood Heat<\/a> by Dantiel W. Moniz<\/p>\n Revolving around the city and suburbs of Jacksonville, Milk Blood Heat is all you could want from a Florida book. It\u2019s 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 \u201cFeast,\u201d which follows a woman haunted by the body parts of her miscarried child; \u201cThicker Than Water,\u201d about a woman who road trips to Santa Fe with her estranged brother and the ashes of her father; and the titular story, \u201cMilk Blood Heat,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hawai\u02bbi: Every Drop Is A Man\u2019s Nightmare<\/a> by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been in awe of Megan Kamalei Kakimoto\u2019s work ever since I read her story \u201cTemporary Dwellers\u201d 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\u2019 occupation and active military desecration of Hawaiian land, this story, like so many in Kakimoto\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cThe Love and the Decline of the Corpse Flower,\u201d where the narrator finds her deceased wife blooming in the corpse flower that grows in their living room; \u201cAiko, The Writer,\u201d in which Aiko breaks her grandmother\u2019s rules to please her literary agent, and writes a manuscript about the kapu Night Marchers; and \u201cMs. Amelia\u2019s Salon for Women in Charge,\u201d 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\u2019s Nightmare, Kakimoto tells Hawai\u02bbi\u2019s stories with compassion and honesty, rejecting mainstream media\u2019s fantastical paradise for the lived reality of Hawaiians under settler colonial rule.<\/p>\n Newark, New Jersey: I\u2019ll Give You A Reason<\/a> by Annell Lop\u00e9z\u00a0<\/p>\n
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