Hilary Plum
This autumn has brought two novels by Eka Kurniawan—a young Indonesian writer, born in 1975—to English-speaking readers. It’s a lucky and too-rare debut for an international writer: having two books appear from different translators and publishers lends an instant diversity to our initial encounter with his work. For many US readers, Kurniawan’s novels may provide their first experience of Indonesian literature. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is perhaps the best-known Indonesian writer here; in an introduction to Man Tiger, Benedict Anderson discusses Kurniawan’s own book on Pramoedya and his complicated relationship to the elder author’s socialist realism. When so little of a 
“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks, published