The Lontar Foundation: 34 books

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...

Afrizal Malna sits apart from many of Indonesia’s recent poets. Not only is he a productive literary and theater critic, he is a novelists and short story writer as well. In a writing career that has now spanned more than thirty years, Afrizal has published several major collections of poetry. His...

Rendra (1935-2009), one of Indonesia’s most important poets and dramatists, was raised within a mystical Javanese milieu. He saw the individual, nature, and society as potentially forming one harmonious whole. This commitment to personal authenticity and social justice was expressed in Rendra’s...

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...

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...

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...

Idrus’s best known collection of stories, Dari Ave Maria ke Jalan Lain ke Roma, from which most of the stories in this anthology were drawn, was first published in 1948 and has been in print ever since. Idrus mostly wrote about ordinary people who were distinguished by some odd characteristic, circumstance,...

Novel Telegram (Telegram) by Putu Wijaya, published in 1973 is considered an important milestone in Indonesian literature. Its success makes the synthesis between reality and fantasy. Although it contains many elements of "mental terror" and psychological disorientation, this book is a portrait...

Armijn Pane’s novel, Shackles (Belenggu) was first published in 1940. Although the main conflict of the story involves a love triangle, the author raises several issues facing society at the time, such as women participating in higher education, their consequent changes in attitude toward family...

In the early 1910s, Semaoen was sentenced to prison for sedition by the Dutch colonial government. The Story of Kadirun, a semi-autobiographical novel, reveals with honesty and comprehensive insight the unjust treatment towards the indigenous people from a historical perspective. Kadirun’s tale,...

A collection of short stories by Lily Yulianti Farid, which has not yet been published as a collection in Indonesian. The stories were written between 2008-2009, showing mosaic spaces in describing Indonesian family life over time. Family room is where the dark side of socio-cultural dynamics and...

A coming-of-age story, a tapestry of erotic and tragic liaisons, a dreamscape of nightmares and wonders. But Ceremony is, above all, a tribute to the ceremony-rich life of the Benuaq Dayak, one of the many “upriver people” of Kalimantan. This post-modern (and first) novel by Korrie Layun Rampan...

In a Gus tf Sakai story, nothing is as it seems. The unexpected is always happening. Supernatural events occur in ordinary settings, turning lives and reality on end. A three-hundred-year-old Torajan mummy refuses to stay dead. A painting takes on a life of its own and paints the painter. Gus tf Sakai’s...

Putu Oka Sukanta, born into a low-caste Balinese family in 1939, began writing poetry and short stories in high school. In the early 1960s, after university studies in Yogyakarta, he moved to Jakarta where he taught high school and began to mix with leftist artists and writers. Sukanta never formally...