The San Diego Participant Observer Book of the Month is Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan.

Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone.Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.—Amazon

“Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia’s most ambitious writer in a generation … Eka is shaping up to be [Indonesia’s] Murakami: approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour.”
—The Economist

“Scintillating and often darkly humorous, Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan is masterful take on the vicissitudes of life for contemporary Indonesians.”
—Asian Review of Books

Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. He has published several novels, including Beauty Is a Wound, Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, and Man Tiger (longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, 2016), as well as short stories. His novels have been published in thirty-three languages, including English.