Are you sure you don't want to sin just a little bit?Once, Sato Reang's father tried to bully him into being a pious child. Now he's a little Devil. He stops saying his prayers. He starts to run with the wild boys: drinking, fighting, stealing. He eats his fill of life, barges in where he pleases. Maybe he'll burn down the school...If only Jamal, his strictly religious schoolmate, would join him. Sato intends to lead him astray and introduce him to worldly pleasures. Even if the consequences are darker than he could have imagined.Devilishly funny and delicately moving, The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is a lightning strike of a coming-of-age novel.



Born in West Java in 1975, Eka Kurniawan is a prize-winning Indonesian author and screenwriter whose books have been translated into 33 languages. In 2016, his novel Beauty is a Wound won the World Readers Award, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and was an eight-time book of the year in the US. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, which was adapted into a film in 2021, is also available from Pushkin Press.Annie Tucker is an award-winning translator from Indonesian to English who has spent years living in Java and Bali. As well as Beauty is a Wound, she has translated Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash and The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks for Pushkin Press.



Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be Southeast Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation



Kurniawan flips effortlessly from first to third person, creating a fun and textured style, which blends a clear-eyed perspective with moments of visceral emotion. This brims with humor and heart



A portrait of childhood that is both funny and quietly devastating... Sato's voice carries the novel forward with infectious energy, even as the shadows deepen around him



--Praise for Beauty is a Wound



Exuberant, funny, crackling with energy and invention



Original and powerful... Maybe, who knows, the judges of the Nobel Prize could, in a few years, consider giving [Eka] the prize that Indonesia has never received



A Southeast Asian storyteller with a magnificent and effortless grasp of his material



Annie Tucker's skilful translation captures Kurniawan's matter-of-fact prose and black humour. Elements of the supernatural and oral storytelling combine powerfully to evoke a brutal past and some of the pivotal events that helped shape Indonesia today



Magical realism to rival that of Gabriel García Márquez



A literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie



Scatological, scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark and messed up and fantastical. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude kicked into another gear, with almost a punk sensibility housed within gorgeous writing-and stories coiled within stories within stories. One of the most brilliant things about the novel is how Kurniawan never loses the thread even when spinning so many tales at once



A pensive portrait of rural anomie. ... A memorable look into a delinquent mind



An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... This is an astounding, momentous book



An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata - exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized



Kurniawan's story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Canterbury Tales



It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks



The final wonder of Beauty Is a Wound is how much pure liveliness and joy there is mixed up with the pain, as if the verdancy of the author's imagination was racing to cover a million corpses with fresh green tendrils



A masterpiece... As invigorating, passionate and exhilarating as One Hundred Years of Solitude