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"A wonderful exercise in humanism . . . [by] a prodigious and impressive storyteller".—Jakarta Globe An epic saga of "families and friends entangled in the cruel snare of history" (Time magazine), Home combines political repression and exile with a spicy mixture of love, family, and food, alternating between Paris and Jakarta in the time between Suharto's 1965 rise to power and downfall in 1998, further illuminating Indonesia's tragic twentieth-century history popularized by the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing. Leila S. Chudori is Indonesia's most prominent female journalist. Home is her debut novel and won Indonesia's most important literary prize in 2013.
The protagonists of the stories in this translated collection all crave a private domain, a place that nobody else can touch. These characters are feisty, non-conformist, and fiercely independent--traits that do not necessarily serve them well in the constraints of the conservative environments in which they find themselves, be that the environment of their family, their work or their country. To read the stories in this collection is to enter the private domain of the characters. It is also to share with those characters their quest for the most elemental thing in life: meaningful connections with other human beings.
A comprehensive, authoritative guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.
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From award-winning Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak comes a tale of profound love against the backdrop of myth, culture, and politics. In this sweeping saga of love, loss, revolution, and the resilience of the human spirit, Amba must find the courage to forge her own path. Amba was named after a tragic figure in Indonesian mythology, and she spends her lifetime trying to invent a story she can call her own. When she meets two suitors who fit perfectly into her namesake's myth, Amba cannot help but feel that fate is teasing her. Salwa, respectful to a fault, pledges to honor and protect Amba, no matter what. Bhisma, a sophisticated, European-trained doctor, offers her sensual pleasures and a world of ideas. But military coups and religious disputes make 1960s Indonesia a place of uncertainty, and the chaos strengthens Amba's pursuit of freedom. The more Amba does to claim her own story, the better she understands her inextricable bonds to history, myth, and love. Revised edition: This edition of The Question of Red includes editorial revisions.
This winning collection of short stories poignantly illustrates contemporary life in Southeast Asia
Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics. Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.
Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border.families. Danny is a Chinese-American teenager of Korean descent whose parents left China when he was nine; his quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast among his peers, and he yearns for the China of his youth.These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea--Danny to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adopted family. The novel transports the reader to one of the most complex and threatening environments in the world, and explores how humanity persists even in the most dire of circumstances.
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"In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overcome. What a procession of developments in one day! Only that morning I had left Madiun; at midday I was wobbling on a buggy past an ocean of rice fields; tonight, suddenly, I had been renamed by my parents and handed a wife." Thus begins Sastrodarsono's life, returning to his village as a newly- appointed schoolteacher, and by virtue of that position, a member of the "priyayi" - functionary gentry awesomely elevated above the peasantry of his origins. From those most traditional of Javanese institutions - change of name and a virtually imposed ...