It can’t be said of many books that every Honolulu home should have one, but HONOLULU STORIES is such a book.  It’s certainly one of the best possible Holiday gifts. The thousand-plus pages of writing about Honolulu, edited by Gavan Daws and Bennett Hymer and published last year, includes every kind of storytelling, and makes the perfect bedside book. It was awarded the Samuel M. Kamakau Award for the 2009 Hawaii Book of the Year, and received an Award of Excellence in Literature. Its 32-page historical introduction is indispensable, and is in itself worth the price of admission.

Honolulu Stories runs over one thousand pages and features the work of over 270 authors, and over 350 selections. It brings together two hundred years of writing and literary history about the town a rich feast of words including short fiction, excerpts from novels, scenes from plays, poems, chants, song lyrics, cartoons, stand-up comedy, and the modern art of slam poetry.

I can't do better than quote from  the publisher's  remarkably eloquent description:

"The story of Honolulu comes alive; from its origins as a tiny village, to raucous whaling port and capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, to multicultural metropolis flanked by Waikiki on one end and Pearl Harbor at the other.

"The myriad of authors featured run the gamut from the world-famous, to locally beloved, to unknown. There are Hawaiian chanters whose names are forever lost, but whose words live on. A roving journalist who called himself Mark Twain; a deserter from a whaling ship who went to work on the waterfront in 1843 Herman Melville; Rap Reiplinger, the genius of Hawaiian stand-up comedy; Jack London, the first ever to include the sport of surfing in short stories; Lois Ann Yamanaka, who did the impossible and took pidgin English to a national level; Korean political exiles; a Portuguese poet in a mom-and-pop store; school kids; a man in prison; a ninety-year-old woman still composing tanka... The human range of the voices included is infinite and the pleasures found within are endless."

HONOLULU STORIES: Voices of the Town Through The Year-- Two Centuries of Writing. Edited by Gavan Daws and Bennett Hymer. Mutual Publishing. 1117 pages $35.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.