Featured in Oprah Daily, Lit Hub, Debutiful, Vulture, Book Riot, Alta Journal, Our Culture Mag, Write or Die, & LGBTQ Reads .
Magnetic, haunting, and tender, Extinction Capital of the World is a stunning portrait of Hawaiʻi—and a powerful meditation on family, queer love, and community amid imperialism and environmental collapse.
In ten stories, Mariah Rigg immerses readers in contemporary Hawaiʻi. By turns heartbreaking and hopeful, these stories of love, longing, and grief are fierce dispatches from land haunted by the specter of colonization, and a precious biome under constant threat.
An older man grapples with the American-weapons research conducted on a neighboring island that reverberates through his entire life. A pregnant woman seeks belonging while poaching flowers in the rainforest with her partner's mother. Two teenage girls find love during a summer spent on Midway Atoll. A young woman returns home to Oʻahu following a breakup and reconnects with her estranged father and the island itself.
Linked by both place and character, Rigg's stories illuminate the exotification and commodification of Hawaiʻi in the American mythos. Extinction Capital of the World is an environmental love letter to the Hawaiian Islands and an indelible portrayal of the people who inhabit them—marking the arrival of an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
Praise
“Hawaiʻi, haunting and beautiful, becomes the undisputed star in this short-story collection….Rigg's debut is a vibrant tribute to [the Islands] and the love that's fostered on its lands.” — Allison Cho for Booklist
“Rigg’s debut story collection takes us to modern Hawai‘i—a place still reeling from the impacts of colonization and dealing with environmental loss. These stories touch on love, heartbreak, and everything in between, all set against the backdrop of the Hawaiian Islands.” — Alta Journal, “15 New Books for August”
“Extinction Capital of the World is a multigenerational, environmental love letter…Mariah maps out [a] complex web of feelings…about Hawai‘i: its susceptibility to climate change, its long history of militarization and imperialism (and our participation in that lineage), and the deep emotions that so many of us hold for the land.” — Nina Michiko Tam for Write or Die Mag
“I love collections of connected short stories and intergenerational narratives. Extinction Capital of the World promises both, but what really excites me about the collection is its consideration of imperialism and environmental destruction in Hawaiʻi, and how those conditions intersect with the lives of the people who witness their consequences every day.” — Oliver Scialdone for Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2025”
“Affecting…this powerful collection of slice-of-life short stories with complete arcs is told in evocative language, with care and empathy.” — Jessica Epstein for Library Journal
“These ten stories expertly explore desire, loss, displacement, and environmental fragility across characters throughout Hawaiʻi…Electric and lyrical. Rigg’s a master short story writer with unbelievable skill.” — Adam Vitcavage for Debutiful, “The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025”
“Electrifying…A masterful debut collection…[Rigg] skillfully intertwines Hawaiʻi’s complicated history of military abuse, missionary usurpation, colonial legacy, invasive tourism, ecological destruction…A wondrous literary gift.” — Terry Hong for Shelf Awareness
“Rigg is an absolutely beautiful writer and a master of subtext; the conversations between her characters crackle with history and deep feelings…A gorgeous, compelling collection that unspools the little-known history of Hawaiʻi and shows how queerness operates in the furthest-flung American state.” — Lydi Conklin for Oprah Daily, “8 Pride Month Books that Celebrate Queer Joy”
“Rigg’s voice is sharp and engrossing, her characters cunning but affable. This is climate fiction at its most humane and emotionally rich.” — Isle McElroy for Vulture, “28 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer”
“This debut collection brilliantly and hopefully contests the finality of any story.” — Kirkus
“From debut author Mariah Rigg comes a collection of short stories interrogating the commodification and fetishization of Hawaiʻi in the American myths, both a love letter to the islands and a warning for future consequences of colonization and climate catastrophe.” — Sam Franzini for Our Culture Mag, “Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2025”
“Extinction Capital of the World is the queer ecological collection of my dreams. Liberated from the western constraint of linearity, these ten stories blissfully cast forward and loop back, attending to all the small and significant ways our choices reverberate across time, across landscapes, across species. Whether moving through the galleries of the Honolulu Museum of Art or navigating the open waters of Kaʻiwi Channel, the characters of Rigg’s world are as vibrant and diverse as the many species populating these pages. Extinction Capital of the World is incisive and deeply compassionate, and Rigg is an extraordinary storyteller.” — Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, bestselling author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
“A heartbreaking collection of queer girlhood that carries the echo of generations, the failure and regrets of children and parents. It aches and aches and aches and then blossoms with the sweep of time, catastrophe, disaster, cruelty, death. Mariah Rigg’s written a stunning debut. I love this book.” — Casey Plett, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of A Safe Girl to Love, A Dream of A Woman, Little Fish, and On Community
“In Extinction Capital of the World, Mariah Rigg traces the contours of contemporary Hawaiʻi with exquisite precision and grace. Across these ten stories, she shows how desire anchors us to vanishing landscapes, and how the heart finds its coordinates even as familiar worlds shift beneath our feet. These are breathtakingly beautiful dispatches from the frontlines of an imperiled ecosystem, rendered with astonishing clarity." — Kimberly King Parsons, National Book Award-nominated author of Black Light and Oregon Book Award-winner We Were the Universe