People from Bloomington

In the 1970s, Budi Darma - one of Indonesia's most acclaimed writers - lived as a student in Bloomington, Indiana. His experiences formed the basis for the renowed short story collection, The People from Bloomington: a portrait of small-town America that offers an incisive view of the West and the people that inhabit it.

In Darma's America, apartment blocks and gasping attic rooms shadow overgrown gardens, empty streets and distances traversable only by car. His stories circle the lonely, the unkempt, and the odd: mysterious old men and gruesomely sick poets, children with strange proportions and women waiting for letters that never arrive.

Tense, quietly surreal and always morbidly funny, The People from Bloomington is one of the great works of twentieth-century Indonesian literature.

Reviews

“First published in Indonesia 40 years ago, this story collection from celebrated author Darma gets a second life—and an English translation—as a Penguin Classic. Across seven stories set in the gridded streets and rented rooms of Bloomington, Ind., Darma’s characters navigate their morbidly funny lives in this meditation on alienation, failed connection, and the universal strangeness of the human mind.”
—The Millions

“Despite his assertion that that the characters from People from Bloomington could have been drawn from any place in the world, Darma perceived, as an outsider, an emerging attitude towards the recluses on the edges of an ordinary Midwestern city. People from Bloomington feels like a report from the early days of the great American unwinding of civic responsibility and sense of interconnectedness. His characters are unsettling because they are recognizable—if not in our communities, then in ourselves. Darma doesn’t let us look away.”
—David Kobe, The Rumpus