People from Bloomington

By: Budi Darma, Tiffany Tsao - introduction, Intan Paramaditha - introduction, Tiffany Tsao - translator

Narrated by: Nathan Agin, Mark Bramhall, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Langston Darby, Sunil Malhotra, Reynaldo Piniella, Eric Sharp, Emiko Susilo, Tiffany Tsao

Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize

Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize

An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha

A Penguin Classic

In these seven stories of People from Bloomington,our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it’s a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time.

For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With The People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world—the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about “strangeness” in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind.

Critic 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

Fiction for people who normally dislike fiction

Amazing narration and captivating storytelling! I can’t get enough of this stuff. I haven’t read fiction in years but this has changed me

disturbing collection of short stories on alienation and isolation

A series of observations and narratives detailing a uniquely American brand of selfishness and meaninglessness. Presenting these fictional riffs on alienation as first-person accounts from slightly unreliable narrators only deepens the sense of malaise. Many of the narrator characters are selfish, petty, cruel, confused, delusional, in denial about their real motivations, or conflicted. Hearing the narrators recount their stories in such a matter-of-fact way serves to make their bad intentions seem that much worse. A lot of the narrator characters are petty. And they're honest about their selfishness. which only serves to make the stories even more unsettling. Well-written with excellent narration. Very interesting to get a non-American perspective on a uniquely American brand of ennui and alienation.

Strange Slices of Life

Interesting works that are eerie and extremely vivid. Every narrator was excellent. Many of these stories will live with you forever.

Fantastic short stories

All of the introductions and literary reviews at the beginning of the book are a pure waste of time of time but the short stories themselves are somewhat dark but fantastic and captivating.

Unexpectedly Deep

The stories in this collection were surprisingly deep and had really great characterisation. Although the language was simple, Indonesian being a simple language itself, the characters felt real and interesting, especially from the authors perspective, a foreigner, who wrote most of these stories while being inspired by the life around him in the small town. Really recommend.