Beauty is a wound
(Book)

Book Cover
Average Rating
Published
New York : New Directions, 2015.
Status
Central - Adult Fiction
F KURNI
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Published
New York : New Directions, 2015.
Format
Book
Physical Desc
470 pages ; 20 cm
Street Date
1509
Language
English

Notes

General Note
Novel.
General Note
"A New Directions paperbook original."
Description
"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"--,Provided by publisher.

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Citations

APA Citation, 7th Edition (style guide)

Kurniawan, E., & Tucker, A. (2015). Beauty is a wound . New Directions.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Kurniawan, Eka, 1975- and Annie, Tucker. 2015. Beauty Is a Wound. New Directions.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Kurniawan, Eka, 1975- and Annie, Tucker. Beauty Is a Wound New Directions, 2015.

MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)

Kurniawan, Eka, and Annie Tucker. Beauty Is a Wound New Directions, 2015.

Note! Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy. Citation formats are based on standards as of August 2021.

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