Night of a Thousand Hells blends the boisterous and the brutal as two women make sense of their younger sibling’s terrorist atrocity. This is a tale of three sisters. Isn’t it always?” This winking comment near the beginning of Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha’s second novel is a canny … [Read more...]
Review
Night of a Thousand Hells: a subversive, shapeshifting tale of sisterhood, violence and grief
October 23, 2026 by
Making the longlist this week for the US National Book Award for translated literature, Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells is a subversive, shape-shifting novel in which family tragedy becomes political reckoning, horror exposes social violence, and familiar stories turn sinister. Set … [Read more...]
Posthumous Indonesian novel newly translated into English critiques American culture and universal social constructs
October 8, 2026 by
Our future is built on the questions of the past. Although the late Budi Darma’s novel, Olenka, was published in Indonesia in 1983, it is only being released in English in the United States in 2026. This is remarkable since the novel’s characters are white, Midwestern Americans. Darma passed away … [Read more...]
Growing pain
October 4, 2026 by
A memoir reveals the resilience and personal toll of surviving political persecution during Indonesia's Cold War purges. The Cold War period was one of the strangest times in human history. It stretched from late 1946 to 1991; quite a breadth of human memories in which people fought, not on … [Read more...]
“My Neighbour, The Dictator” by Tari Lang
September 20, 2026 by
The years immediately following Indonesian independence were optimistic ones. The early 1950s are remembered as the “parliamentary period” of pluralism, when communists, socialists, nationalists, Islamists and the military vied for positions in the government. But debate between these parties was … [Read more...]
