“Rigg’s voice is sharp and engrossing, her characters cunning but affable. This is climate fiction at its most humane and emotionally rich.” — Vulture, "28 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer"
“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 Hawai’i and shows how queerness operates in the furthest-flung American state.” — Oprah Daily, “8 Pride Month Books that Celebrate Queer Joy”
“This debut collection brilliantly and hopefully contests the finality of any story.” — Kirkus
“Mariah Rigg makes a debut with an electrifying, interconnected 10-story collection highlighting both Native and settler residents of Hawai?i. . . . [this] intricate collage of people and events creates a wondrous literary gift.” — Shelf Awareness
"These ten stories expertly explore desire, loss, displacement, and environmental fragility across characters throughout Hawai’i. Each is electric and lyrical. Rigg’s a master short story writer with unbelievable skill. As someone who has never been to Hawai’i, this transported me there and made me care about the people, locations, and history like no book ever has." — Debutiful
“From debut author Mariah Rigg comes a collection of short stories interrogating the commodification and fetishization of Hawai?i in the American myths, both a love letter to the islands and a warning for future consequences of colonization and climate catastrophe.” — Our Culture Mag, “Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2025”
“In Extinction Capital of the World, Mariah Rigg traces the contours of contemporary Hawai'i 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 We Were the Universe
“Extinction Capital of the World is the queer ecological collection of my dreams. Liberated of 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 Ka?iwi 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, 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, author of Little Fish