The history of Bangladesh’s conception is incomplete without recognising the multitudes of sacrifices and labour that academics and intellectuals had poured into their aspirations for Bangladesh, often at the cost of their own safety and livelihood.

The city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, was once the breeding hotspot of the 20th century’s greatest writers, scientists, scholars, and activists.

Folk Melody of Bangladesh: An Anthology of Bangladesh Folk Music in Standard Notation is a music anthology that compiles 204 carefully chosen folk songs of Bangladesh that date from the 16th century.

These nuanced characterisations of those who have suffered terribly and are desperately trying to rebuild themselves are what have kept me hooked to the series.

In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime. 

Review of ‘Nexus’ (Random House, 2024)

I was a Twilight girl.

Being an ardent admirer of K-pop culture, I wonder why I was hitherto unaware of this gem of a book, One Left by Kim Soom, and the excruciatingly painful truth it delineates.

‘Shabnam’ is a dewdrop in Persian. Shabnam (1960) is the name of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s passionate love story that stretches beyond the history of nearly a century ago.

Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.

As of writing this article, the official death count in the Palestinian genocide has surpassed 42 thousand lives. In my room, I quietly sit and read excerpts from Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Portobello Books, 2015) in celebration of her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Review of ‘Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia’ (Picador India, 2023) edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Tarana Husain Khan, and Claire Chambers

'The Hippo Girl and Other Stories' holds up a mirror to a society that judges and ridicules those that do not adhere to its shortsighted vision of a homogenised culture.

In Alex Christofi’s newly published fascinating book—Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean—we get a deep close-range look at one of world civilisation’s interesting hotspots that has long swayed between the cross-currents of the rise and fall of the great monotheisms.

Review of ‘Bidrohi Puran’ (Pendulum Books, 2024) by Arif Rahman

Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures. 

The best part of this book is perhaps the fact that all the weird, bonkers cultish stuff just happens with no rhyme or reason to it.

In Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik (originally published in 2015 and translated in 2023 by Mohamed herself), wishes have not only drastically altered the fabric of daily life in Egypt, but the world at large.

Chip War, a highly praised book written by Chris Miller who teaches International history at Tuft University’s Fletcher School, USA, is a New York Times bestseller.

Review of ‘The Displaced Rohingyas: A Tale Of A Vulnerable Community’ (Routledge, 2024), edited by SK Tawfique M Haque, Bulbul Siddiqi, and Mahmudur Rahman Bhuiyan.