In the contested notion of creating a ‘nation,’ few ideas provoke as much ire among the everyday citizens of a bordered entity as the concept of a space—one that carries with it the weight of instilling an identity.

Beyond the celebration of Eid, this book also explores themes of love, loss, and the grief of spending a special occasion without a loved one.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva takes us on a bumpy apocalyptic horror ride in her debut novel Candelaria. Spanning across three generations of women, the novel ushers together an unsettled past and an even more bizarre present.

“Mr Speaker Sir, what did Bangalee intend to achieve? What rights did Bangalee want to possess? We do not need to discuss and decide on them now [after independence]. [We] tried to press our demands after the so called 1947 independence. Each of our days and years with Pakistan was an episode of bloodied history; a record of struggle for our rights,” said Tajuddin Ahmad on October 30, 1972 in the Constituent Assembly. He commented on the proposed draft constitution for Bangladesh, which was adopted on November 4, 1972.

Review of ‘Apni Ki Alien Dekhte Chan?’ (Afsar Brothers, 2024) by Wasif Noor

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Bangladesh has suffered the terrible luck of having to deal with authoritarianism several times since its inception, most recently under the Awami League from 2009 to 2024.

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977). 

In Good Material, Dolly Alderton uses her sharp humor and keen observations to explore the challenges of adulthood.

Our Stories, Our Struggles: Violence and the Lives of Women (Speaking Tiger Books, 2024) is an anthology edited by Mitali Chakravarty and Ratnottama Sengupta.

Review of ‘Deadly Class’ (first published in 2014 by Image Comic), created and written by Rick Remender

Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

Review of ‘Renegotiating Patriarchy’ (LSE Press, 2024) by Naila Kabeer

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally published in 1967) has long been heralded as a masterpiece of magical realism and a cornerstone of Latin American literature.

Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.

Proverbs, short and profound, often sum up wisdom passed down through generations. Bangla, one of the world’s most spoken languages, is rich with such gems. One such saying in the language—”manush ki bolbe?”—is central to Intimacies of Violence, a debut book by Dr Nadine Shaanta Murshid, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.

Bangladesh is currently going through turbulent times as it tries to find its way out from dictatorial political rule towards an uncertain future. During the past decade,  Bangladesh did achieve significant economic progress, but it came with increased economic inequality, unparalleled corruption, and loss of personal freedom.