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Budi Darma was a novelist, short-story-writer, and literary critic. Budi Darma received several national literary awards and his international honors include the Southeast Asian Writers Award (or S.E.A. Write Award) and the Mastera Literary Award. He held a PhD in English literature from the University of Bloomington, Indiana, and was a professor at the State University of Surabaya. Tiffany Tsao (translator and introducer) is a literary translator and writer. Her translations have been awarded the PEN Presents and PEN Translates prizes. She has translated numerous Indonesian works, has written about literature in translation for Electric Literature, and is the author of The Majesties (2020) and the Oddfits series. She holds a PhD in English literature from UC-Berkeley. Intan Paramaditha (foreword author) is an Indonesian author and a lecturer in media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife. Her debut novel Gentayangan (The Wandering), selected as Tempo Best Literary Work for Prose Fiction in 2017, received the PEN Translates Award from English PEN and the PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America.
“First published in Indonesia 40 years ago, this story collection from celebrated author Darma gets a second life—and an English translation—as a Penguin Classic. Across seven stories set in the gridded streets and rented rooms of Bloomington, Ind., Darma’s characters navigate their morbidly funny lives in this meditation on alienation, failed connection, and the universal strangeness of the human mind.” —The Millions “Despite his assertion that that the characters from People from Bloomington could have been drawn from any place in the world, Darma perceived, as an outsider, an emerging attitude towards the recluses on the edges of an ordinary Midwestern city. People from Bloomington feels like a report from the early days of the great American unwinding of civic responsibility and sense of interconnectedness. His characters are unsettling because they are recognizable—if not in our communities, then in ourselves. Darma doesn’t let us look away.” —David Kobe, The Rumpus
