News Release
Honolulu Stories Available in Stores Thursday, April 17, 2008
HONOLULU—Mutual Publishing, LLC, one of Hawai‘i’s largest trade publishing houses, is launching Honolulu Stories, which will be available in stores on Thursday, April 17, 2008.
A first-of-its-kind book, Honolulu Stories brings together 200 years of Honolulu-inspired literary works.
From Waikīkī to Pearl Harbor, from Nu‘uanu to Nanakuli, the 1,100-page book features more than 350 selections–short stories, excerpts from novels, scenes from plays, musicals and operas, poems, chants, song lyrics, cartoons, stand-up comedy routines and slams by more than 250 authors, in nine different languages with translations.
The authors range from Hawaiian kings and queens, chiefs and commoners, to writers from all over the world and from different walks of life: journalists and poets, comedians and convicts, surfers and soldiers, politicians and pig hunters.
Some of the writers are world-famous, others are locally beloved: a roving journalist who called himself Mark Twain; Herman Melville, a deserter from a whaling ship who worked as a pin-setter in a waterfront bowling alley in 1843; Rap Reiplinger, the genius of stand-up comedy; Robert Louis Stevenson, who penned verses for a Hawaiian princess under a banyan tree in Waikīkī; Jack London, the first ever to put surfing in short stories; James Jones, an enlisted man who enrolled in a college composition course at the University of Hawaii and wrote From Here to Eternity; and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who did the impossible and took the colorful pidgin language of Hawai‘i to a national level.
There are also scores of unknowns who tell compelling stories of their experiences: Hawaiian chanters whose names are lost but whose words live on; Japanese plantation workers; Korean political exiles; a Portuguese poet in a mom and pop store; a man in a prison cell; school kids from second grade on; a grown-up wild child; and a 90-year-old woman still composing tanka, a classic Japanese form of poetry. The human range of the voices is infinite and the pleasures of the book are endless.
Honolulu Stories is edited by noted Hawai‘i author Gavan Daws and Mutual Publishing, LLC Publisher Bennett Hymer.
Daws first came to Hawai‘i in 1958 and has written 13 books, published worldwide, in a life that has taken him back and forth between the United States and Australia, with stints in Europe and Asia. His documentary films about the Pacific have won awards internationally. His books about the Islands include Shoal of Time; Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai; and Land and Power in Hawai‘i.
Hymer has lived in Honolulu for almost 40 years. Since founding Mutual Publishing in 1974, he has produced nearly 500 books about Hawai‘i in almost every genre. A love of the Islands and a love of stories and writings about the place continue to inspire him in his work. In 2001, he co-authored with Glen Grant Hawai‘i Looking Back: An Illustrated History of the Islands.
Mutual Publishing, established in 1974, is one of Hawai‘i’s largest trade publishing houses. It offers one of the largest selections of Hawaiiana titles in the Islands. Mutual Publishing draws from a diverse group of dynamic authors, artists, photographers, and experts who chronicle a wide range of subjects from history and natural sciences to fiction and local arts and crafts. Mutual Publishing also offers a full range of private label products and services. For more information, visit www.mutualpublishing.com.
Softcover
6 x 9 inches vertical
Suggested retail: $35.00