As expected, Dee Lestari novels always captivated me. I’m amazed by her ability of stringing words to parse complicated understandings into a more easy to grasp sentences. All those theories about dream world are laid out clearly so the story could easily be enjoyed. The spiritual journey of the … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

GABY RUSLI WRITES (in her ongoing series on classic Indonesian literature) — Through versatility and natural eloquence, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s, The Girl From The Coast (1987), took a seemingly simple story based on the author’s grandmother’s life into a complex metaphor that simultaneously … [Read more...]

GABY RUSLI WRITES (in a series of reviews on Indonesian classics) — Corruption. Collusion. Nepotism. The hypocrisy of the wealthy. All odds are stacked against the poor. These are some of the authentic and intriguing themes in Mochtar Lubis’ third novel, Twilight in Djakarta (1963). Lubis’ story … [Read more...]

People from Bloomington are strange indeed, at least in this translated collection of stories from Indonesian writer Budi Darma. In these seven fiction stories, Darma takes a mirror to the wide open spaces of the Midwest American college town of Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied for his PhD in … [Read more...]