Kitchen Curse: Stories - Softcover

"These stories show how we are laid bare to the chaos, mysteries and powers of all kinds of other beings, and how we have always continued to resist, and to simply live." - Khairani Barokka, author of Rope "Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation ... Eka is shaping up to be [Indonesia's] Murakami: approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour." - Economist "These short, spiky tales are a joy to read." - New Internationalist "It's easy to see why he is being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and hailed as one of the leading lights of contemporary Indonesian fiction." - Financial Times "Kurniawan's writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, Garcia Marquez and Dostoevsky, as well as Indonesia's own social-realist master Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom domestic fans have dubbed him an heir." - Guardian "Many have deemed Kurniawan the next Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an acclaimed pioneer of socialist realism." - New Yorker "These stories are blasphemous, perverse, and shocking! But so are you, if you're a human being. With exceptional fervor, wit, and bite, Kurniawan faces the truth. Can you?" - James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods "Scintillating and often darkly humorous, Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan is masterful take on the vicissitudes of life for contemporary Indonesians. - Asian Review of Books

Hailed as a Southeast Asian Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the exuberant beauty of his prose and the darkly comic surrealism of his stories, Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize. Here is his first collection of short stories to be translated into English. A man captures a caronang, a strange, intelligent dog that walks upright, and brings it home, only to provoke an all-too-human outcome. A girl plots against a witch doctor whose crimes against her are, infuriatingly, like any other man's. Stories explore the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, a perpetual student, victims of anti-communist genocide, an elephant, a stone. Dark, sexual, scatalogical, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.