Kitchen Curse

Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time

Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.

Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.“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

“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

“These short, spiky tales are a joy to read.”
—New Internationalist

“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

“It’s easy to see why [Kurniawan] is being compared to Gabriel García Márquez 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, García Márquez 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

“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

“Sex, violence, and betrayal loom large throughout, as in Kurniawan’s award-winning previous novels.”
—Library Journal

“Erupting with awareness and dark wit, this work puts Kurniawan in league with Hassan Blasim, Witold Gombrowicz, and Daniil Kharms.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“The Indonesian writer’s short story collection tells tales of hope and disappointment from Reformasi, the period following the ouster of the country’s dictator Suharto. In Kitchen Curse, the act of storytelling becomes a way of reimagining the means through which the political finds expression.”
—Noah Flora, Nation

“These stories are sites of bold experimentation … They provide ways of looking at Indonesia’s politics, history, and culture through the lens of the everyday and the marginal: the world of the outcasts.”
—Intan Paramaditha, Singapore UnboundEka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia, in 1975. He has published several novels, including Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, as well as many short stories. He is a recipient of the Prince Claus Award and has been named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker.