"Families Fiction." . . . . "Families." . . "Indonesia" . . "Indonesia." . . . . . . "Beauty is a wound"@en . "Beauty is a wound" . . . "Translations" . "The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star. Compulsively readable, Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, and romance in an astonishing epic novel, in which the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by every monstrosity. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole is a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders, followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule. Drawing on local sources-folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit-and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Beauty is a Wound is passionate and ironic, exuberant and confronting. Hailed as 'the next Pramoedya', Eka Kurniawan is an exciting new voice in contemporary literature."@en . "Electronic books" . . "Cantik itu Luka" . . . . . . . . . "Cantik itu luka" . . . . . . . . . . . . "Popular literature" . . . "History"@en . "Fiction"@en . "Fiction" . . . "\"The English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan: \"without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite\" (Benedict Anderson). One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, sweeping, compulsively readable novel, combining history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. It is also a highly political book. Revolving around the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters, various plotlines incorporate incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past. The rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million \"Communists,\" and the three decades of Suharto's despotic rule that followed. The bravura resilience on display here makes Beauty Is a Wound a luscious yet astringent product of the art blossoming since the fall of Suharto. Kurniawan's distinctive West Javanese voice will be entirely new to American readers, and its local sources (the all night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope; the famous local folk tales) will astonish, but Kurniawan draws as well on his favorite world writers, Melville, Gogol, Hamsun, and Marquez\"--"@en . "Speculative fiction." . . "Indonesian fiction." . . "Mothers and daughters." . . "Prostitutes." . . "Mothers and daughters Fiction." . . "Prostitutes Fiction." . .