The best Hawai'i writing.

Old news to me, but I just wrote this in a letter to my advisor so I thought I'd share with you, too:

Kaui Hart Hemming’s House of Thieves* is not only the most fresh/recent story collection (or novel) set in Hawai‘i but also one of the best (tied only, in my eyes, with the novels Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers and When the Shark Bites). What I like about Kaui's writing is her very dry wit, her unsentimentality, and the intrinsic way she “gets” people. I appreciate her ability to write about Hawai‘i and its unmatchable beauty and perhaps otherworldliness without getting bogged down into an alienating exoticism. The familiar anthropological adage “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange” holds true for writing, as well. Fact of the matter is, people are people wherever you go, and Kaui nails people dead on the head. Kaui also has a novel out, The Descendents, which is being made into a film by Alexander Payne (of Sideways fame) and which actually grew out of one of the stories in House of Thieves.

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* Disclaimer: I knew her at Sarah Lawrence, where I was an undergrad and she was a grad student. But she did not pay me to say this, nor would she need to, as she's gotten plenty of great press on her very own.