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

08/13/2025

Hawai‘i’s uncanny instrument is on the rise again, and for similar reasons as its surreal popularity and adoption across the world in the 1900s—resistance to a coup. Author and musician Mark Panek draws on the landmark work of musicology, John Troutman’s KIKA KILA: HOW THE HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR CHANGED THE SOUND OF MODERN MUSIC, for the backbone of his thesis on how Joseph Kekuku’s shimmering guitar innovation at the turn of the century didn’t just create a trademark Hawai‘i sound that served to advertise the Islands as a destination. It actually broadcast a message of resistance and sovereignty.

Troutman, curator of American music at the National Museum of American History, and a mean steelman himself, scored a headline-grabbing coup when he tracked down the receipts that matched appearances and recordings by Hawai‘i’s steel guitarists in seemingly every Delta town with a future famous bluesman, including Robert Johnson, with their arrivals occurring just a year or two before the locals made their debuts on the blues-style steel guitar.

The book scored a second scoop, however, of equal weight, if not as widely recognized or understood. And here Panek does Hawai‘i and our current moment in America a real service—because we can see how steel guitar and its accompanying Native Hawaiian sheet music, particularly that written by Queen Lili‘uokalani, put words of resistance in the mouths of performers and parlor singers around the world.

Now that we’re in a similar fix as the one faced by the Kingdom of Hawai‘i after the Bayonet Constitution—with a majority of the population effectively losing their right of representation, along with the plundering of our resources and economy to benefit the ultra-rich—we may now see what KIKA KILA was saying more clearly in 2016, when by coincidence Donald Trump first came to power. And as Troutman again produces the receipts, with Panek’s own able assistance at drawing the necessary connections to 2019’s Mauna Kea rising, perhaps we’ll also see where we have to go next, and how.

Read "Hawai‘i’s Steel Pulse" by Mark Panek (and more!) at The Hawaiʻi Review of Books:

https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/hawaiis-steel-pulse

05/20/2025

Our headline and deck for a new Q&A between poet Wing Tek Lum and Jill Fukumoto—about the gestation and development of his masterpiece of Chinatown, THE OLDTIMERS, out from Bamboo Ridge Press—is "The Great Chinese-in-Hawai‘i Novel (is a poem)".

This is a work that can be read with pace and pleasure on many levels. It's seasoned with Lum's wisdom and own life experience, but also works on that egoless plain of compassion and empathy that informs great works of art. Fukumoto's sensitive and probing questions reflect her own experience as a trustee of the United Chinese Society, a co-founder of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Hawai‘i's (CCCH) Young Professional organization, and a lot more.

Why does Chinatown need a response now? Read THE OLDTIMERS and you will realize how little any of us know about those who came before us, particularly those whose backgrounds we don't share—or, as is often the case with Chinatowns, stereotype.

Another reason is the poem is a response to Lum's awakened awareness of the stories that can never be told, of the pioneer generations who thought they would come home and never did, yet never married and so perished without ancestral devotions and memory.

By reading of their lives as Lum has reimagined them your response can, in a sense, set them free: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/the-great-chinese-in-hawaii-novel

05/07/2025

In the latest iteration of THROB we debut a new department, called "Responses," that is itself a response to a Facebook post by poet and publisher Susan M. Schultz, which was itself a response, a poem dashed off at a scene she observed:

•

LAX, April 1, 2025

Just past customs—nothing to declare—
weeping, gnashing, keening
man on floor head and hair in hands…

•

Schultz's poem was a solution to something that had been nagging editor Don Wallace for some time—how to respond to events without becoming a knee-jerk feed of the justifiable but predictable. The answer: art.

So now we have Responses. The Hawaiʻi Review of Books isn't Instagram or Facebook or TikTok so it's not going to be a daily, weekly or even monthly thing. But Thing it is for when the moment arises and one of us, one of you, answers the call.

Read "LAX, April 1, 2025" by Susan M. Schultz here: https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/lax-april-1-2025

03/22/2025

Please join us for some exciting literary events this month:

At 1 p.m. tomorrow (Saturday, March 22) at UCS Hall (42 N. King Street), come celebrate Wing Tek Lum’s landmark poetic history of the Chinese and Chinatown, THE OLDTIMERS. In addition to Lum reading excerpts, “An Afternoon of Poetry: Excerpts and Insights will Wing Tek Lum” features cultural and civic leader Jill Fukumoto in conversation with the author.

At 2 p.m. next week Saturday, March 29, we’re at DaShop.hnl, where Susanna Moore will speak with UH professor Ann Rayson. Moore will also be signing books, and DaShop, of course, will be selling them. The support of DaShop to our literary and reading community has been one of the few bright spots in a year of tumult and dread.

We hope to see you this weekend or the next!

03/13/2025

March is the month of lambs and lions, and so it proves for us who follow and support Hawai‘i and books.

Coming in like a lamb is Virginia Loo's memoir of single motherhood, HOW TO BE, a candid, funny, unsentimental account of the lengths the globe-trotting epidemiologist went to in order to get pregnant and then give birth. You can read a conversation between her and local journalism treasure Susan Essoyan (plus an excerpt!) here in THROB: hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/bringing-up-baby

Going out at the end of the month like a lion is literary lion Susanna Moore, who's making a rare public appearance March 29 at 2 p.m. at DaShop.hnl, in conversation with UH professor Ann Rayson. Moore won Honolulu Magazine's Book of the Year (Not About Hawaiʻi) in last year's inaugural Honolulu Book Awards for her frontier historical novel THE LOST WIFE. Her classic Hawaiʻi trilogy of MY OLD SWEETHEART, THE WHITENESS OF BONES, and SLEEPING BEAUTIES helped shape the rise of a new local literature—and a wider market for writing about Hawaiʻi than by those from here.

See you at DaShop! (And stay tuned for more from your friends at THROB.)

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

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