Lontar: 62 books

Home is a remarkable fictional account of the September 30th Movement’s impact on people’s lives. This “movement” led to the murder of a million or more presumed “Communists” and the imprisonment of another tens of thousands of people. At the time, thousands of Indonesians who were abroad...

German title: Dreisamkeit - Ein Akt zu dritt Indonesian title: Lakon Bertiga Set in a small hotel in Yogyakarta, this play is a tale of thwarted aspirations and the mundane realities of adult life. It is also a commentary on the fluidity of sexual behavior as one female and two male characters try to ascertain the meaning of their relations with one another.

German title: Wie man wahre Liebe findet und andere Erzählungen Indonesian title: Teknik Menemukan Cinta Sejati dan cerita lainnya These neatly-constructed postmodern tales demonstrate the author’s skill at deception. Even in stories that contain portraits of reality, readers are...

First published in 1927 as Bunga Roos dari Tjikembang, Kwee Tek Hoay’s The Rose of Cikembang is an excellent example of the so-called peranakan literature of the Netherlands East Indies that flourished between 1900 and the Japanese Occupation beginning in 1942. Highly sentimental in tone, the novel...

As an airhostess with the new Indonesian Airlines, Elisa is determined to establish her independence and find a place where she really feels she belongs. With a troubled family background and almost no knowledge of her past or ancestry, Elisa is searching for her true identity. If finding her real...

As with the works of other Iwan Simatupang, The Pilgrim (Ziarah) is characterized by unusual writing. The Pilgrim is a mixture of complex, poetic lyrics and a meditation on life, death and art. Through the figures of artists and an cemetery overseer, the author convey the thoughts of philosophy and...

Fireflies in Manhattan, a collection of short stories by Umar Kayam, brings together significant works representing the three major focal points of this his literary career: stories about New York City, with an archetypal cast of New York characters; stories about the 1965 abortive Communist coup...

And the War is Over (Dan Perang pun Usai) was written by Ismail Marahimin in 1977. The novel tells of the escaped Dutch soldiers who became prisoners of war by the Japanese army in the hinterland of Sumatra. Escape would have been a wasted effort because World War II had ended and Japan had just been...

The protagonists of the stories in this translated collection all crave a private domain, a place that nobody else can touch. They share with their creator a passion for words, a passion for writing and a passion for literature. These characters are feisty, non-conformist, and fiercely independent—traits...

The 1953 publication of Sitor Situmorang’s Green Paper Letters pegged him as a rising poet. Six decades later, the writer was still active and for this book, more than a hundred poems were selected from the several thousand poems he wrote. The main characteristic of Sitor’s poetry is the simplicity...

German title: Zwei Essays Indonesian title: Dua Esai Few Indonesian essayists can compete with Nirwan Arsuka in his ability to pull together different strands of thought, periods of history, and fields of knowledge in a cohesive unit that is easy to read. Nirwan exercises a remarkable dexterous hand when it comes to bringing characters from the distant past back to life.

A novel written by Hanna Rambe, Mirah from Banda (Mirah from Banda) was published in 1986. It was set in the beautiful island of Banda as an illustration of beauty. Reveals the dark side and human tragedy caused by war and slavery by the Dutch and Japanese invasions by telling of the injuries and...

The poetically crafted stories found in this collection by Triyanto Triwikromo –the first by this writer in English translation, are leavened by sardonic wit, a touch of the absurd, and the bizarre in a world gone mad. A Conspiracy of God-Killers is not itself the title of any of the short stories...

The author’s thoughts are reflected through this love story of forbidden lovers, telling a story about customs that were no longer in line with the times, and desire for release from the shackles of traditional societies that did not provide an opportunity for the young to express their opinions...