Hailed as a Southeast Asian Gabriel García Márquez 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.
