The Lontar Foundation: 34 books

The Weaverbirds, a landmark novel when first published, is a tale of both physical and spiritual struggle, spanning the formative days of Indonesian independence and the Indonesian oil crisis in the mid 1970s. Larasati, the precious daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Antana, and Setadewa, the army-brat son...

Jazz, Perfume & the Incident, by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, was first published in Indonesian in 1996 and is the first major Indonesian literary work to deal critically with the horror of life under military occupation in East Timor. This novel, which defied Indonesia’s regime of censorship, made...

Atheis (The Atheist), first published in 1949, portrays the spiritual and intellectual crisis of Hasan, a young Muslim who is raised to be devout but comes to doubt his faith after becoming involved with a group of modern young people. Upon publication, religious thinkers, Marxist-Leninists, as well...

Drought, a translation of Iwan Simatupang’s novel, Kering (1972), is a joyous celebration of life and human commitment. Its hero is an ex-student, ex-soldier, and ex-bandit, who decides to transmigrate to one of the outer islands of Indonesia to restart life as a farmer. His near failure brings...

Before Dawn is a collection of poems by Sapardi Djoko Damono dating from 1961 to 2001. One of Indonesia’s most popular poets. Sapardi first began writing poetry as a high school student in the mid-1950s. Before Dawn follows the poet through the different stages of his life, opening with the 1964...

Morphology of Desire gives a generous introduction to the full range of writing by the internationally acclaimed Indonesian poet, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, from the 1980s to the present day. Through a distinctive mix of striking imagery and boldness of voice, the poet sets out to destroy many of the...

On November 1991, Indonesian soldiers opened fire on protestors in Dili, capital of East Timor, killing an estimated 250 people. For publishing a report on this massacre, Seno Gumira Ajidarma, an editor of Jakarta-Jakarta magazine at the time, was dismissed from his position. He sought another way...

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...

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 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...

Half a century ago when Mochtar Lubis’ Twilight in Jakarta was secreted out of Indonesia and published in London, it was the first Indonesian novel ever to be published in English translation. The novel, a depiction of social and political events in the capital during the run up to a national election,...

Supernova: The Knight, The Princess and the Falling Star (Supernova: Ksatria, Putrid an Bintang Jatuh), published in 2001, is an innovator in the development history of modern Indonesian literature. Written by a young writer, as intellectual work that takes the form of pop-art and is set in the real...