Blood Work and Other Stories

What we carry. What we inherit. What we leave behind.
Seventeen stories of connection and survival in a place caught between what’s sacred and what’s sold.

On the Windward side of Oʻahu, change moves quick—developers buy up neighborhoods, locals move away, and families struggle to hold on to what remains. Beneath each loss, however, lie quiet acts of resilience that refuse to be forgotten.

Against a backdrop of economic hardship, housing instability, cultural transition, and environmental decline, Donald A. Carreira Ching offers readers a deeply intimate portrait of contemporary Hawai‘i. His characters live in a Hawai‘i far removed from tourist postcards, navigating sorrow, displacement, and the weight of generational trauma. Yet even in these quiet, overlooked corners, they hold fast to the connections that root them in place and community.

With grace and grit, Carreira Ching renders Hawai‘i as few others have, bearing witness to what’s being lost while illuminating what endures: love, memory, and the deep connections between people and place. This collection affirms him as a vital voice in contemporary American fiction and a key contributor to the evolving canon of Hawai‘i literature.

Blood Work and Other Stories is an unflinching portrayal of Hawai‘i’s harshest realities, but grittiness does not mean pessimism. Rather, Carreira Ching writes with tenderness. Threats are rendered in complex, often heart-breaking reality, even as Carreira Ching navigates his characters, and his reader, toward community connection and hope. In formally inventive stories filled with intimacy and grace, Carreira Ching invites us to understand the Windward coast of O‘ahu as few other writers can. 

—Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This is Paradise and Clairboyance

In Blood Work and Other Stories, Hawai‘i serves as both a sanctuary and a witness to lives shaped by loss, family bonds, and the fragile threads of culture. From a father searching for his daughter during the aftermath of a devastating flood in iconic Waikīkī to a young man searching for his motherʻs story through a VHS tape he finds after her passing, each story explores the quiet, sometimes heartbreaking struggle to keep aloha alive in a rapidly changing Hawai‘i. What kept me reading was how intimate the stories felt to me, how grounded I felt reading from one story to the next.

—Lisa Linn Kanae, author of Islands Linked by Ocean

In Blood Work and Other Stories, Donald Carreira Ching presents readers with a series of finely etched characters navigating their way through the nightmares, challenges, and glories of a vividly captured contemporary Hawaiʻi. The result is a panoramic view of the islands, assembled out of character portraits displaying all of the subtleties, strengths, and formal mastery that the best short story collections have to offer.

—Craig Howes, Professor of English and co-producer, Aloha Shorts, HPR 2009–2012

Donald Carreira Ching presents a collective portrait in darker hues of the vacant spaces that once housed all we have lost in a single generation. Each story in this collection is crafted exquisitely and is haunted by the truth that we are a place in transition because we are a people in transition. Blood Work and Other Stories is a rare gem for those of us who like our fiction honest.

—Scott Kikkawa, author of Kona Winds, Red Dirt, and Char Siu

Carreira Ching’s stories rise to touch the universality of the collective experiences we all face in Hawai‘i, our nation, and at its essence, our world in chaos; our worlds of loss, addiction, alienation, crime, kūpuna, and climate change seen through the eyes of the writer’s honesty and empathy—the quintessential intensity of bearing witness to catastrophic situations without judgment or shame, a release resounding with a generous pragmatic love.

—Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of Behold the Many

Set against a backdrop fraught with meth abuse, domestic violence, land overdevelopment, mass exodus of locals, and U.S. military’s continued intervention in the islands’ political and natural landscape, Carreira Ching has written seventeen finely crafted, timely, and heart-rending stories.