Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Through the Years: Two Centuries of Writing

Hawaii has never seen a book like
this! 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.
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.