The Lontar Foundation: 34 books

Never the Twain, the translation of the novel ‘Salah Asuhan’ by Abdoel Moeis, was first published in 1928 as an allegory of the struggle of the Indonesian community in finding a national identity during Indonesian pre-independence. The story is told thorough Hanafi, a young Indonesian who received...

The Dancer, a trilogy of novels, recounts the tumultuous days of Indonesia in the mid 1960s. In luscious descriptive language, author Ahmad Tohari describes a village community struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The Dancer highlights the lives of Srintil, a dancer, and Rasus, a bewildered...

In August 1883, massive volcanic eruptions destroyed two-thirds of Krakatau islands, located in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. It was the day the world exploded. Tsunami wreaked havoc in the region, causing countless deaths. Shock waves were recorded around the world. Ashes from the eruptions...

A novel by S. Rukiah, The Fall and the Heart (Kedjatuhan dan Hati), was published in 1950?, is one of the strongest works written by women writers before the 1970s, but less well-known because of the political problems (who’s?). The novel tells of a middle-class woman who lived during the 1965 revolution,...

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...

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...