JENNIFER Lindsay has been translating Goenawan Mohamad’s columns since 1992. She has captured Goenawan’s Indonesian prose with striking clarity. Goenawan, of course, was editor of Tempo, the Indonesian weekly opinion periodical that he founded in 1971. And for the journalist, activist, editor, … [Read more...]
Raka Ibrahim: An ode to the classics
September 9, 2018 by
Counterculture journalist Raka Ibrahim’s debut novel, Bagaimana Tuhan Menciptakan Cahaya (How God Created Light), is a collection of short stories inspired by popular Middle Eastern folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights. In his debut novel, Raka Ibrahim utilizes the premise of two … [Read more...]
Hotel Tua
August 12, 2018 by
Hotel Tua comprises 18 Budi Darma’s short stories dating from the 70s to the first decade of 2000s. It perhaps deserves to get dubbed the modern classic of the genre, although Orang-Orang Bloomington obviously gets the more fame and critical acclaim. This new collection is not to be underrated, … [Read more...]
A Practice Wife’s Story
August 11, 2018 by
One of the most moving sections of the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer's excellent memoir, ''The Mute's Soliloquy,'' contains instructional letters to his children. In ''Music, Sports, Self-Defense and a Story,'' he tells his daughter Yana about a Siberian woman who once gave him a package … [Read more...]
Of Sleeping Birds and Limp Dicks
August 10, 2018 by
Progressive Impotence for a Global #MeToo What does a flaccid penis look like? Eka Kurniawan, the Indonesian writer who burst onto the world lit scene in 2015, describes it as a newly hatched bird: ugly-cute, small, vulnerable. Still, this little bird looms large in his third novel Vengeance Is … [Read more...]