Interview

In the months leading up to President Soeharto’s resignation in May 1998 after more than three decades of authoritarian rule, Indonesia was gripped by a wave of protests as economic collapse and political unrest converged. Across university campuses and city streets, students mobilized, calling for … [Read more...]

n Tiffany Tsao’s new novel But Won’t I Miss Me, we’re invited into a world slightly off-kilter from our own. At first, our protagonist Vivi’s life seems relatively normal, though tough — she’s a new, single mother to a son named Cloud; she has a day job refurbishing old equipment. Motherhood, to … [Read more...]

Felix Nesi’s People from Oetimu could be the funniest book about colonial terror ever written. Opening with the World Cup in the late nineties only to spiral back to decades of violence in Timor, the book is a treatise on a whole menu of colonialisms (Portuguese! Japanese! Indonesian!), yet its … [Read more...]

Queer horror has long used monsters, ghosts, and demons to explore questions of identity, belonging, and survival. In Phoning Faust, filmmaker and writer Sophie Mutiara Nova brings those themes into the digital age, following a lonely young woman whose late-night call to the Devil spirals into a … [Read more...]

Inspired by national struggles and everyday exhaustion, the Cigarette Girl author writes a story about ants that feels deeply human. In a world still run by patriarchs, the writer behind Cigarette Girl turned to a tiny, underground matriarchal society to find feminist answers. Ratih Kumala’s … [Read more...]