THE SHELF / 6 books that I read at the end of last year… I hated 5 of them

Twelve Churches succeeds in its ambitious goal of revealing Christianity's global complexity through architecture and human stories, embracing the deepest contested contradictions that add to the pageantry of religious faith in the modern world.

The novella is written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, who represents sloth. He is a nostalgic and unambitious man. Legally and on paper, he is the director of their family business, Sona Masala, although he does no actual work.

For bilingual readers, especially for children of Bangladeshi immigrants, it is striking to see how organically English and Bangla words interact on the page

As the breeze takes on its familiar chill and exams finally come to an end, my favourite season quietly takes over the city. It is not the long vacation, nor the crisp winter air. It is wedding season. All I want from this stretch of the year is a fresh stack of invitations, each promising a feast for the senses and, of course, a plate of biryani.

North South University’s Department of English and Modern Languages (DEML) concluded its first-ever Winter Fest spanning December 10-11, bringing together literature, performance, film, and visual art in a two-day celebration of creative expression on campus.

Shimulia was a remote village. A girl from this village was named Madhurilata. The origin of this name remained a mystery to most of the villagers. Nevertheless, they affectionately referred to her as Madhu, which meant honey.

The Polish nurse at the rehabilitation center asks her to decide. Does Neela want to have an abortion or wait for the delivery? “You’re almost seven months,” the nurse says in English. “An abortion would be very risky.”

The relationship between mutual intelligibility and linguistic classification is famously complex, often boiling down to politics rather than purely linguistic differences. In Scandinavia, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are treated as separate languages primarily because they belong to different countries, a separation cemented by historical events that dissolved pan-Scandinavian political unions.

The ecological impact of the 1971 War of Liberation is not as well documented as some of the other, spectacularised aspects of war.

A lively winter fair will present locally crafted accessories and seasonal favourites, celebrating community creativity and winter warmth

As we commemorate Begum Rokeya Day, Oborodh Bashini stands not as a relic of a bygone era but as a living blueprint for modern resistance. The stories she told are specific to a time, but the structures of silencing they represent are hauntingly familiar.

In a wilting summer swelter of 1797 in London, a name was born twice–mother Mary Wollstonecraft wound the clock of daughter Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin)’s life, for the very first time.

The Little Boy.He sold magic .mostly for free, .wrapped in candy wrappers, .joy and spring-coloured rosettes, .and, at times, priced at .a few tufts of dandelion threads.

Students at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (ULAB) crowded into a packed classroom on a winter morning on Sunday, November 30, awaiting the start of a program that would be part interview, part poetry reading. “Meet the Poet: Shaheen Dil—In Conversation with Dr Mushira Habib” organised by the Department of English and Humanities was an hour-long dive into the life and work of poet Dr Shaheen Dil, a Bangladeshi writer and retired academic, banker, and consultant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Fiction has long chronicled that women have always worked more than what is counted, felt more than what is acknowledged, and lost more than what anyone will ever quantify.

If you have ever carried a tote bag to a coffee shop solely to place it on the table next to a freshly prepared matcha latte, you already know the assignment. Reading, in the modern era, isn’t really about “reading” or enjoying a story—it is about signaling. It is about letting the person seated at the next table know that while you could be doomscrolling TikTok, you choose to instead engage with a higher form of brain simulation.

All’s Well circles one maddening question: what does pain need to look like before someone finally believes you? And how do you stop before it gets too discomfortable?

The unnamed You can get lost trying to  get back to the exit at the Vatican Museum. 

There is always a subtle tension when a story migrates across cultures. Some narratives travel with the lightness of wind, reshaping themselves almost effortlessly inside new imaginations, while others arrive heavy with the weight of the worlds that first produced them.

Some books explain immigrant life through nostalgia. Others through big dramatic events. Sharbari Ahmed does neither in <I>The Strangest of Fruit</I>. Her stories focus on the quieter things like small humiliations, awkward encounters, the private wounds people carry, and the memories they don’t