People from Bloomington

Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize

Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize

An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha

A Penguin Classic

In these seven stories of People from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it’s a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time.

For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With The People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world--the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about ＂strangeness＂ in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind.

Budi Darma is novelist, short-story-writer, and literary critic, Budi Darma has 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 holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Bloomington, Indiana, and is 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 (Atria Books Jan 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.