IDWRITERS / PC
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People from Bloomington
Written by Kat at Thornfield Hall Redux, originally published in Personal Blog
May 11, 2022
People from Bloomington
Written by Kat at Thornfield Hall Redux, originally published in Personal Blog
May 11, 2022
I highly recommend the Indonesian writer Budi Darma's People from Bloomington, a collection of short stories newly translated by Tiffany Tsao. Like Darma, I attended graduate school in Bloomington, a beautiful, idyllic college town in Indiana, so I was curious about this book. Although as a midwesterner I "assimilated" effortlessly, and loved the culture so much I would never have left had there had been any jobs, Darma, a student from Java, was isolated and lonely. I am horrified by the descriptions of xenophobia in some of the stories: even when Americans are friendly, there is a distance between cultures.
Read the full article here.
