Overview

I had no idea that the day I lost my foreskin I stumbled into a trap, completely ignorant and unprepared. Sato Reang never wanted to become a pious child. But now Father is dead, and there are no more prayers. Sato can live as he chooses: he eats his fill, pisses on cars, laughs heartily at the craziest jokes. He sets the movie theatre on fire. Sato Reang doesn't hide his face anymore. But, what can he do about Jamal? The only kid in the village who shared Sato's torturous religious upbringing. No one's ever told him he should commit one tiny sin... Until today. Filled with devilish humour, The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks is a heart-breaking fire whip of a novella about delighting in wickedness and the costs of vengeance.

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9781805334897

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Reviews

Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be Southeast Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation * Economist * Kurniawan flips effortlessly from first to third person, creating a fun and textured style, which blends a clear-eyed perspective with moments of visceral emotion. This brims with humor and heart * Publishers Weekly, starred review * A portrait of childhood that is both funny and quietly devastating... Sato's voice carries the novel forward with infectious energy, even as the shadows deepen around him * Asian Review of Books * --Praise for Beauty is a Wound * -- * Exuberant, funny, crackling with energy and invention * The Times * Original and powerful... Maybe, who knows, the judges of the Nobel Prize could, in a few years, consider giving [Eka] the prize that Indonesia has never received * Le Monde * A Southeast Asian storyteller with a magnificent and effortless grasp of his material * South China Morning Post * Annie Tucker's skilful translation captures Kurniawan's matter-of-fact prose and black humour. Elements of the supernatural and oral storytelling combine powerfully to evoke a brutal past and some of the pivotal events that helped shape Indonesia today * Financial Times * Magical realism to rival that of Gabriel García Márquez * Independent * A literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie * The New York Review of Books * Scatological, scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark and messed up and fantastical. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude kicked into another gear, with almost a punk sensibility housed within gorgeous writing-and stories coiled within stories within stories. One of the most brilliant things about the novel is how Kurniawan never loses the thread even when spinning so many tales at once * Jeff VanderMeer * A pensive portrait of rural anomie. ... A memorable look into a delinquent mind * Kirkus * An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... This is an astounding, momentous book * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata - exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized * Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) * Kurniawan's story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Canterbury Tales * Sydney Morning Herald * It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks * Brooklyn Magazine * The final wonder of Beauty Is a Wound is how much pure liveliness and joy there is mixed up with the pain, as if the verdancy of the author's imagination was racing to cover a million corpses with fresh green tendrils * The Saturday Paper * A masterpiece... As invigorating, passionate and exhilarating as One Hundred Years of Solitude * Livres Hebdo *

Author Information

Born in West Java in 1975, Eka Kurniawan is a prize-winning Indonesian author and screenwriter whose books have been translated into 33 languages. In 2016, his novel Beauty is a Wound won the World Readers Award, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and was an eight-time book of the year in the US. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, which was adapted into a film in 2021, is also available from Pushkin Press. Annie Tucker is an award-winning translator from Indonesian to English who has spent years living in Java and Bali. As well as Beauty is a Wound, she has translated Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash and The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks for Pushkin Press.

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