The Book of Mating

Winner of the Humanities in Translation Prize

The Book of Mating is a masterfully translated collection of stories in which Indonesian women explore the full spectrum of mating: marital, sexual, and spiritual; forced and free; transcendent, ruinous, and mundane. Laksmi Pamuntjak portrays both the constraints and opportunities facing women caught between the enduring restrictions of local norms and hierarchies and the tantalizing promises of globalized modern life, between internalized myths and social realities.

An experimental melding of Pamuntjak’s creative, journalistic, and activist work, these stories read as urgent dispatches from the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora—and as universal narratives of women’s lived experiences. Annie Tucker’s nuanced translation takes us from the prison island of Buru and the Bogor Botanical Gardens to Paris’s Left Bank, offering a polyphonic testament to the universal fight for women’s autonomy over their bodies and their lives.