The months following the fall of Soeharto in May 1998 comprise one of the most tumultuous periods of modern Indonesia history. Many Indonesians refer to those months as the jaman edan, a poetic term for a chaotic time when evil is rewarded and good punished. The jaman edan, while a time of horror and suffering, had its share of absurdity and farce.Jakarta Jive is a chronicle of the jaman edan through the eyes of those who lived through it. At times humorous, at other times harrowing, Jakarta ...

People love to call Li Qing an apostle of poetry. He has played a leading role in popularizing Chinese poetry throughout the world. Li Qings realistic concern with life and his unaffected pursuit of the true, the good and the beauty become the soul of his poetry. Reading Li Qings poems means to know him and to know his simple and noble character - Liu Zhangqiu The image of war rises from the red pervading the spring of 99 in Kosovo; the red flowers are a reminiscence of the Kosovo peonies; ...

Darius was perfectly comfortable living in his world of occasional inanities. He was the unsullied king of ease and complacency. Nothing could have ruffled his existence until one fateful night when things unaccountably turned complicated. Without rhyme of reason, the women he so dearly loved left him and the one good friend he could always count on for consolation drew him into a web of bizarre events that threatened to turn his world in a tailspin.Set in Jakarta, Heart of the Night explores ...

Danarto is a master short story writer, whose roots reach deep into the Indonesian subconscious. His style is easy and lyrical, yet he deals with subjects of tremendous importance love, death and the possible spiritual greatness of human being.Could man become God? Could he be perfect? Could he bear the rustle of distant breathing? This is a ridiculous dream: it is barely possible that man can become God. It is barely possible that God wants to reveal Himself physically.Burton Raffel has ...

Is Kirk Coningham just another bule choked by the black, leaded hands of the third-world city he lives in? Who, gasping for air, and getting more black fingers stuck up his nose, thinks he can write a book about the city and the black wounds it left in his head? Yes.But Coningham has conscience. His stories are angry at the misogyny of the white expats The Expats, sad at the nearly-doomed love between a motorbike-taxi driver and an office worker Ojek Driver and equally exasperated and ...

They Say I'm a Monkey is a collection of short-stories from the young Indonesian writer Djenar Maesa Ayu. In the eleven stories, Djenar turns footnotes of urban Jakarta life, and the inner lives of the city's inhabitants, into stories that keep in their narratives both the magic and the realism of the place. Stories that will crawl out from the margins into the centre of your conscience. When They Say I'm a Monkey first appeared in Bahasa Indonesia in 2002, it shocked readers with its ...

Sex, Power and Nation, brings together for the first time Julia Suryakusuma's essays spanning 24 years of writing, applying her analysis to Suharto's regime and that of Indonesia's fledgling democratic politicians.Divided into three parts: "Building a New Nation?", "Sex and Power", and "Literature: Exploration and Boundaries" the book explores the characteristics, hypocrisy, sex manipulations of the New Order regime in the great nation through the eyes of a feminist ...