 Short stories and sketches in Malay have been recorded in Indonesia since the 1870s , and a short story collection — H. Kommer 's Warna Sari — was published in 1912 . These early stories used vernacular Malay and were often humourous or derived from fairy tales or detective fiction . Short story @-@ writing developed further in the 1920s and 1930s , when short stories and sketches in a more formal register of Malay were widely published in such magazines as Pandji Poestaka and Poedjangga Baroe . The first collection of short stories in the Indonesian literary canon , Mohammad Kasim 's Teman Doedoek , was published by Balai Pustaka in 1937 . This collection was a commercial success , selling 4 @,@ 000 copies by 1941 . 
