It was there, in New York, where he began to hone his literary skills. The publication of his first collection of short stories, A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan, in 1972, gained him national fame as a short story writer. The light and semi-ironic tone of Kayam’s “New York stories,” in which the author viewed an archetypal cast of New York characters through the lens of a naïve Indonesian outsider vanished completely in the next phase of the author’s career when he dealt with more serious and political issues in his home country.