Marno took out a cigarette, then stood and went to the window. Lowering his gaze he looked at the jungle of skyscrapers. They appeared to be asleep. The pale moonlight made them look cold and hard. A feeling of emptiness and loneliness surged within him. from the short story “A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan” ------- Born in Ngawi, East Java, in 1932, Umar Kayam obtained his masters…
Sapardi Djoko Damono, one of Indonesia's most productive and popular poets first began writing poetry as a high school student in the mid- 1950s. Before Dawn includes poems written by the author over a forty year time span, from 1961 to 2001. Arranged as they are in chronological order, the poems in Before Dawn together form a kind of poetic autobiography. In "One Night," written in 1964, the a…