In ten all-absorbing, gentle, and melancholy short stories, Mariah Rigg’s debut Extinction Capital of the World is an ode to modern life on the Hawaiian Islands. These stories discuss complex family relationships, types of love, community, and the human condition in a small corner of our warming, dying, beautiful world. Along the warm splash of Hawai’i’s beaches, under the shady leaves of its rainforests, and beside its unique plants and creatures, we get to know many types of people. We feel the internal chaos of mother-daughter relationships, the weight of the unsaid between brothers and fathers alike, and re-experience the whimsy and newness of young love. “Dawn Chorus” made me feel nostalgic. “Orfea” made me take a deep breath. “Field Dressing” made me feel sad, and found out. “The All of It” made me want to call my mom. All ten stories contribute to the whole—a collective narrative that feels like a deep breath of gratitude, longing, and heartbreak for a future in the face of climate change. These stories both celebrate and grieve for Hawai’i, while dangling its scarcity, the ticking clock, so barely out of reach of human hands.
Rigg writes eloquently and carefully, her prose containing a beat and rhythm that sound just as heartfelt as it does strong, demanding attention. Her many characters contain the real and raw of personhood, and she finds ways to place elevated, sometimes gut-wrenching, lines of poetry within paragraphs where they are not expected but still felt. These stories glide together smoothly, the characters living lives that intermingle and merge in subtle and intentional ways.
Throughout the collection, we are persistently reminded of the way people are linked to land, water, and to each other through experiences and struggles. Hawai’i’s struggle against the piercing gaze of environmental collapse, the lingering ghosts of US military spending, the noise of condominium developments, and the erasure of native culture through Manifest Destiny do not just haunt the narrative of these stories, but forcibly override it—always harmful and always unwanted.
Hawai’i is dubbed as the extinction capital of the world, as more species, specifically birds not found anywhere else, have been lost due to factors induced by humans than in any other state. The Hawaiian Islands, and other colonized vacation destinations, exist for Americans as a faraway, purchasable, dreamland experience easily confined to a memory within a refrigerator magnet or coffee mug. Sold as a honeymoon, a problem-solving, life-changing vacation that commodifies the culture and land without hesitation, reading these stories about people who coexist with the consequences of remorseless American imperialism filled me with an overwhelming sense of loss, and panic.
Despite being a mainlander, and perhaps among the target market for an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort—Rigg’s writing speaks to those of us who are awake, conscious, and fully aware of the state of the planet we breathe on, aware of what’s to come. It is not with the tone that the winner of our fight against climate change has already been decided, it is attempting to accept the unacceptable—the fact that there will be far more loss before humankind will successfully find the new path forward. The path behind us, the one we followed to get here, is already gone.
My favorite stories are the ones that leave me unsatisfied. Not because it is not whole or it is unfinished, but because I am often not ready to part ways with a window to another part of the world that I may never see, so soon. Some of the best stories our world has to offer are small, limited, confined, able to withstand, and seem to give beyond their means—much like the Hawaiian Islands and its people. Stories that leave me longing, thinking, mourning what could have been, and grateful for its existence at all, like those in Extinction Capital of the World, remind me of what is enough.
FICTION
Extinction Capital of the World
By Mariah Rigg
Ecco
Published August 5, 2025
