On Oct 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the official establishment of the People's Republic of China, the aims of the Communist Party of China were still largely unknown to the majority of the war-weary Chinese. Now a new kind of state had emerged- a People's Republic. People wondered with varying emotions what new changes this would bring to their daily lives and to their country. Zhang Da-Peng's novelistic memoir of his first four decades, Life under Mao Zedong's Rule, is a striking and chillingly unforgettable response to this question, for three of these decades encompassed the entire...

A coming-of-age tale, a tapestry of erotic and tragic liaisons, a dreamscape of nightmare and wonders, the novel Ceremony, is above all, a paean to the ceremony-rich life of the Benuaq Dayak people of Kalimantan. This post-modern novel took the Indonesian literary scene by storm when it won the Jakarta Arts Councils novel writing competition award in 1976. The author, relatively unknown when he received the award, went on to establish himself as one of Indonesias major literary figures. After almost four decades, Ceremony retains its power to thrill, awe, and mystify readers.

The poetically-crafted stories found in this collection by Triyanto Triwikromo, the first by this writer in English translation, are leavened with sardonic wit, a touch of the absurd, and the bizarre in a world gone mad. A Conspiracy of God-Killers is not itself the title of any of the short stories in this collection but derives from a suggestion by Triyanto himself. The title embodies the dominant theme of these stories: that organized violence and persecution of the vulnerable amounts to a conspiracy against God.