🔷️ Budi Darma is one of Indonesia's prominent modern writers. He graduated with an MA from Indiana University Bloomington in 1976. His experience and observation during his college days are the inspiration of this collection of seven short stories, titled Orang-Orang Bloomington, or People from … [Read more...]

💃🏻 Srintil and Rasus, our protagonists, were born and grew up in a small village in Indonesia called Dukuh Paruk, which, geographically, is quite isolated. It can only be reached from the outside by traversing the network of dikes bordering the wet rice fields. This isolation, I believe, has … [Read more...]

Karisma Price’s debut is rich with aphorism and rhetoric; Will Harris’s second book is a meditation on family; Gabrielle Bates’s debut borrows from fairy tales; and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collected poems sum up a career, and a life. Starting and ending in her native New Orleans after Hurricane … [Read more...]

For readers who like mysteries that are suspenseful but not frightening, here are five new and recent books that may keep you up late finding out whodunnit — but won’t scare you out of sleeping altogether. (Berkley) Sixty-year-old widow Vera Wong’s rigidly structured schedule — up at 4:30 a.m. … [Read more...]

HISTORY Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship Max Lane Penguin, $34.99 In the second week of January, Indonesian President Joko Widodo expressed deep regret for the country’s dark history of human rights violations, chief among them one of the worst … [Read more...]