BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / A firebrand’s journey to Washington from Barisal

“Agunmukha” translates to “fire-mouth” in English. The word mirrors the tumultuous life of Noorjahan Bose, shaped by her early years in cyclone- and flood-prone small towns of Barisal; her experience of sexual violence at the age of 10; the loss of Imamuddin, her first love and husband, to smallpox; single motherhood; and her later marriage to Swadesh Bose, a Hindu man—an interfaith union opposed by society.
29 January 2026, 00:00 AM Books & Literature
FLASH FICTION / The rickshaw artist
24 January 2026, 01:52 AM Books & Literature

FLASH FICTION / Pirouette of a phoenix
24 January 2026, 01:48 AM Books & Literature
POETRY / Memories
24 January 2026, 01:36 AM Books & Literature
EDITORIAL / Why read?
22 January 2026, 00:00 AM Books & Literature

INTERVIEW / Reclaiming the unwritten: Kanika Gupta on colonialism, embodiment, and the art of remembering

Gupta shares her insights on reclaiming forgotten histories, reimagining myths, and connecting ancient narratives to contemporary ecological and social concerns.
22 November 2025, 11:51 AM Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / “Words are, to me, a way of understanding truth”: An hour of history and poetry at ULAB
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.
5 December 2025, 13:50 PM Books & Literature
EVENT REPORT / An eco-critical look at Sultan: Reading the manuscript of ‘Sultan Er Krishi Jiggasha’
With the aid of Duniyadari Archive, Pavel Partha’s soon-to-be-published book Sultan Er Krishi Jiggasha is a new addition, which looks at Sultan’s work from an eco-critical perspective.
8 November 2025, 11:43 AM Books & Literature

Around the world in 80 books with David Damrosch

Literary historian David Damrosch’s travails with World Literature are charted most often by those within academia. During the Covid-19 inertia
23 September 2020, 18:00 PM

‘Ajob Deshe Alice’: Alice’s adventures now in Bangla

Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland (1865)
16 September 2020, 18:00 PM

Orwell’s ‘1984’ was a warning, not a prediction

Two strange events took place in November 2016; Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 48th President of the United States, and George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, suddenly became a best seller again.
9 September 2020, 18:00 PM

Two books that explore life in psychotherapy

I picked up this book while trying to find a good therapist in this dreary land.
9 September 2020, 18:00 PM

Submission and surveillance in Suzanne Collins’ dystopia

Twelve years ago, Suzanne Collins introduced us to The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press), a dystopian world where children fight to their televised deaths in a brutal annual competition.
2 September 2020, 18:00 PM

SHUTTER STORIES: Books to read on World Photography Day

Ironically a book without images or photographs, On Photography collects American philosopher, filmmaker and activist Susan Sontag’s essays on the history of photography, its inherent voyeurism, and how it affects the way we perceive and experience the modern world through an often capitalist lens.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Are we reading ‘A Seaman’s Wife’ the right way?

Something that has always fascinated me about Bangladeshi literature is it’s attachment to and exploration of space—be it in prose, poetry, or music, almost all Bangladeshi and even Bengali literary work engages with how we are impacted by land, home, country, season, and other natures of charged atmosphere.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Humanity, freedom, and magic realism in the face of authoritarian powers in Iran

The novel is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl. Bahar died in a fire after her family home—a secular and intellectual space—in Tehran is stormed by fanatics.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

The fires of Partition in East Bengal

Three years before Maloy Krishna Dhar’s death, his memoir, Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal (Penguin India, 2009), came out. Born in a sleepy village of Kamalpur in the Bhairab-Mymensingh region next to Meghna and Brahmaputra, Dhar had an illustrious career as a teacher, journalist, intelligence officer, and writer.
12 August 2020, 18:00 PM

'Shirley' crystallises Shirley Jackson’s contested legacy

Shirley (2020), directed by Josephine Decker and adapted by Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 eponymous novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, interweaves fact and fiction into an imagined narrative about the time when author Shirley Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman (1951).
5 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Technicolour Mughals: Ira Mukhoty brings Akbar to life

Humans are a storytelling species. Yet history, which is but the stories of yesteryears, is taught like a chain of facts and dates.
29 July 2020, 18:00 PM

Bibhutibhushan, an unlikely adventurer

For anyone sitting through heat-stricken afternoons on forever-long summer days, reprieve can come in the form of escape into a fictional world, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is a master at offering it.
22 July 2020, 18:00 PM

On White privilege and Islam

Islam is practised by 1.6 billion people across the world. But when you grow up in a predominantly Muslim country like Bangladesh, it can often exist as a localised concept in your head.
15 July 2020, 18:00 PM

Into the nuances of history: Sudeep Chakravarti unpacks the Battle of Plassey

Sudeep Chakravarti is an eminent commentator and author whose narrative non-fiction and fiction have been translated into Bangla, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, German and more. In January 2020, his book—Plassey:
24 June 2020, 18:00 PM

William Dalrymple's 'The Anarchy': Risky business and the company that never left

The book starts with the origin of the word loot, a slang word for plunder. It was imported into the English language while the East India Company and its officers pillaged—for more than 100 years—Bengal, Mysore,
10 June 2020, 18:00 PM

The absence of climate change in fiction and other great derangements

The book explores our inability at the level of literature, history, and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
3 June 2020, 18:00 PM

Isolation is personal and political in Olivia Laing’s ‘The Lonely City’

Ever since social isolation began in an attempt to contain the Corona virus, the internet has flooded with references to the American realist painter Edward Hopper, especially his iconic work, ‘Nighthawks’ (1942).
3 June 2020, 18:00 PM

Climate and Fiction: Amitav Ghosh against Climate Change

There exists a deeply fascinating relationship between crisis and literature – either crisis gives birth to great literature or great literature offers an astute and substantial representation of crisis.
20 September 2019, 18:00 PM

Jokha Alharthi's 'Celestial Bodies': More than a glimpse into a culture

Just like the pools that drip from Abdallah's home into the longer al-Awafi alleys, these insightful, heartfelt snippets capture the lived experience of an Oman in transition over decades
12 September 2019, 18:00 PM

A simple, straightforward reading of South Asian history

Dr Nurul Islam has been a towering presence in the intellectual landscape of Bangladesh. He has graduate degrees from Harvard, and held prestigious fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Yale and the Netherland School of Economics, was Professor and Chair of Economics at Dhaka University, and the author of about 29 books of some scholarly heft and influence.
29 August 2019, 18:00 PM