Translated by Harry Aveling, Keith Foulcher, and Brian Russell Roberts Sitor Situmorang (1924–2014) was one of the most prominent Indonesian writers of the mid-twentieth century. Born into a high-status family of the Batak ethnic group indigenous to North Sumatra, he was a Dutch-educated Indonesian nationalist who experienced firsthand the transition from the Dutch East Indies of his youth to the modern Indonesia of his adulthood. The nine stories in this collection are a window into the world of a postcolonial Indonesian writer dedicated to exploration and change but resolutely attached to the land, the people, and the stories of his Batak homeland. Set variously in northern Europe, the maelstrom of post-independence Jakarta, and modernizing traditional communities in his native North Sumatra, the stories live in—as the translators put it—the “perpetual tension between the urge to wander and a longing for origins.” Indeed, Sitor’s short stories speak not only to readers interested in Indonesian literature and literary modernism but also to all who ponder what it means to find one’s place in the world. Selected by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for their AAWW Staff Picks: Best of 2018