The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Dewi Lestari's Supernova: The Knight, the Princess and the Falling Star.
With Indonesia the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall, Indonesian literature should be more in the news (and bookstores) and I am trying to get a few more titles in before then -- and the Lontar Modern Library of Indonesia is a great place to start (this is a volume in that series).
On top of that, the film adaptation of Supernova -- see the trailer ! -- just came out a few months ago. (Yeah, just domestically; it's not playing at the local cineplex yet.)
This is an interesting example of local(ized) literature: despite being (technically) available in English for a few years now, it probably hasn't sold very many copies in the US/UK, and I assume it's the first time you've heard of it. But apparently it sold 14,000 copies in its first two weeks of Indonesian publication -- "the fastest-selling Indonesian novel to date" -- with this and the two (still untranslated) sequels selling some 200,000 by the time this book appeared in English. (Not many copies by US/UK publishing standards, but a very big deal in Indonesia.)
As to author Dewi Lestari -- let's face it, if you're not one of my Indonesian readers, you've never heard of her. (Okay, the complete review's readership is very knowledgeable, so there probably are two or three non-Indonesians among you who have, but otherwise .....) Yet Lestari has 1.11 million Twitter-followers -- more than almost any author under review at the complete review, I suspect. (By comparison: Stephen King has 671,000; Margaret Atwood 726,000, and even Salman Rushdie just 956,000.)
With Indonesia the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall, Indonesian literature should be more in the news (and bookstores) and I am trying to get a few more titles in before then -- and the Lontar Modern Library of Indonesia is a great place to start (this is a volume in that series).
On top of that, the film adaptation of Supernova -- see the trailer ! -- just came out a few months ago. (Yeah, just domestically; it's not playing at the local cineplex yet.)
This is an interesting example of local(ized) literature: despite being (technically) available in English for a few years now, it probably hasn't sold very many copies in the US/UK, and I assume it's the first time you've heard of it. But apparently it sold 14,000 copies in its first two weeks of Indonesian publication -- "the fastest-selling Indonesian novel to date" -- with this and the two (still untranslated) sequels selling some 200,000 by the time this book appeared in English. (Not many copies by US/UK publishing standards, but a very big deal in Indonesia.)
As to author Dewi Lestari -- let's face it, if you're not one of my Indonesian readers, you've never heard of her. (Okay, the complete review's readership is very knowledgeable, so there probably are two or three non-Indonesians among you who have, but otherwise .....) Yet Lestari has 1.11 million Twitter-followers -- more than almost any author under review at the complete review, I suspect. (By comparison: Stephen King has 671,000; Margaret Atwood 726,000, and even Salman Rushdie just 956,000.)