** NOTE: Advance ticket sales end at 3PM, but we may have room for entry at the door, first come / first serve: just let us know when you arrive that you don't have a ticket yet. **

Booksmith is thrilled to host Megan Kamalei Kakimoto for her wrenching and sensational debut story collection, Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare. She'll be in conversation with our hero and yours, Mimi Lok, (Last of Her Name). Join us!

About the book

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is 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.

Advance praise

"A knockout. Eleven knockouts, one KO for every story." – Elizabeth McCracken

"A stunning debut." – Laura van den Berg

"Throbs with searing talent." – Kali Fajardo-Anstine

"As exquisite as it is terrifying." – Jenny Tinghui Zhang

About the authors

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. She lives in Honolulu. Photo by Van Wishingrad.

Mimi Lok is the author of Last Of Her Name, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut short story collection, a California Book Award silver medal, and finalist for the Northern California Book Award and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Her novella from the collection The Woman in the Closet placed as a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award. Mimi’s work can be found in McSweeney’s, the Believer, Electric Literature, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, the South China Morning Post, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and fellowships from MacDowell, Hambidge, Plympton, and the Anderson Center for her writing, and from the National Endowment for the Arts for her work with Voice of Witness (VOW), an award-winning human rights & oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program. For almost fifteen years Mimi served as VOW’s founding executive director and also as its executive editor. Born and raised in the UK, Mimi lived and worked in Hong Kong as a visual artist, writer, and educator. She lives in California.

Please note:

• Masks will be required throughout the duration of the event and capacity will be limited to allow indoor distancing. Protocols are subject to change.
• Because we’re limiting capacity, we can't guarantee we'll have space for walk-ins. The best way to ensure you’ll get a seat is to order the Book + Seat ticket through this link; you can also RSVP for a free seat right here while they last.
• We are happy to offer *signed copies* of Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare: order a Book + Seat ticket bundle if you'd like to pick up a signed copy at the event, or order here if you just want a signed copy and no admission.
• You can order Mimi's book here.
• If we feel it is not safe to gather, as the event gets closer, we will pivot to a virtual event and your registration will remain valid.
• Questions? Write tickets@booksmith.com.