Author Description

The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Short Stories is the first definitive anthology in English of Indonesian short stories from the twentieth century. These two volumes, featuring a selection of 109 of the most popular and influential works of short fiction, span the entire century, from pre-Independence Indonesia to the year 2000, and include many new translations. The editors drew from a wide cross section of Indonesian short story writers with respect to ethnicity, gender, class, and ideology. Volume 2 presents 61 stories dating from the founding of the New Order government that followed a national bloodbath in 1965 to just after its end in 1998 and the dawn of the second millennia. Along with the rise of “newspaper-length short stories” and a dwindling focus on realism, this period was marked by numerous changes in style and form, especially in the last decade of the century when authors, concerned with the militaristic nature of the central government, began to adopt a much more direct approach.