Eka Kurniawan

The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising literary star. Compulsively readable, Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, and romance in an astonishing epic novel, in which the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by every monstrosity. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole is a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past—the rapacious...

Told in short, cinematic bursts, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is gloriously pulpy. Ajo Kawir, a lower-class Javanese teenage boy excited about sex, likes to spy on fellow villagers in flagrante, but one night he ends up witnessing the savage rape of a beautiful crazy woman. Deeply traumatised, he becomes impotent and turns to fighting as a way...

I had no idea that the day I lost my foreskin I stumbled into a trap, completely ignorant and unprepared. Sato Reang never wanted to become a pious child. But now Father is dead, and there are no more prayers. Sato can live as he chooses: he eats his fill, pisses on cars, laughs heartily at the craziest jokes. He...

After half a century, writes renowned Indonesia scholar Benedict Anderson, Pramaoedya Ananta Toer has found a successor. Eka Kurniawan has been described as the brightest meteorite in Indonesia's new literary firmament, the author of two remarkable novels whose sheer beauty, elegance, cosmopolitanism, and ambition have brought comparisons not only to Pramaoedya, universally considered Indonesia's modern literary genius, but also to...