Celebrating diversity and language at “Bhasha Utshob 2025”

Gulshan Society held a two-day language festival at the Gulshan Lake Park, curated by Sadaf Saaz and Jatrik. The event took place over the weekend of 21-22 February that saw discussion panels, original musical performances, and poetry recitations, surrounded by an array of book stalls and food courts.
26 February 2025, 18:00 PM

Between tradition and taboo: The arranged marriage trope in Bangla dark romance literature

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not endorse or condone any form of abuse or exploitation.
26 February 2025, 18:00 PM

Murakami and the limits of an artist’s imagination

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.
5 February 2025, 18:00 PM

Rediscovering Reading: How ‘Fragments of Riversong’ helped me heal

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.
5 February 2025, 18:00 PM

Shards of clarity

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.
16 January 2025, 18:00 PM

Accounts of a joyless life

Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.
16 January 2025, 18:00 PM

Through folklore and fantasy: An ode to Bangla mythological characters

The book invites you to revel in the world of legends, to dream as you once did as a child.
1 January 2025, 18:00 PM

Redefining aviation safety culture

Research on Aviation Safety: Safety is a Mindset by Air Commodore Munim Khan Majlish is a fresh look at the concept of aviation safety challenging standard ideas about safety.
18 December 2024, 18:00 PM

UPL marks its 49th anniversary with book fair celebration

The University Press Limited (UPL) celebrated its anniversary with readers, writers and well-wishers. The exchange of greetings was held from 4 PM to 8 PM at the UPL central office, located at Green Road in Farmgate area of Dhaka, on December 13 (Friday).
18 December 2024, 18:00 PM

‘Catfish and Avatars’: Discussions on cyber lives and cyber safety

The phrases “cyber safety” and “cyber lives” may seem vague and not very well understood among Bangladesh’s netizens.
18 December 2024, 18:00 PM

A tale of survival, dominance, and self-discovery in colonial Bengal

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.
12 December 2024, 18:00 PM

Confronting cultural silence on IPV in Bangladeshi communities

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.
12 December 2024, 18:00 PM

How to make incendiary literature

Zines are a new name for an old thing. They are the revolutionary pamphlets of the 1930s, and the underground student manifestos of the ‘50-’60s. They are a distant relative of the tattered choti mags. There are many other examples from around the world of self-published, self-distributed, and often dangerous reading material.
4 December 2024, 18:00 PM

I love you; it’s ruining my life

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.
4 December 2024, 18:00 PM

Storytelling, struggles, and reimagining identity

Patriarchy would have you believe that women are inherently complicated—creatures who must be defined, boxed in, or reduced to stereotypes.
27 November 2024, 18:00 PM

Of homes and the worlds: Women, violence, and the domestic space

November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, marks the beginning of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence which goes until December 10, Human Rights Day.
27 November 2024, 18:00 PM

Regional cooperation and the challenges Bangladesh faces

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.
20 November 2024, 18:00 PM

An intellectual debt worth remembering

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.
20 November 2024, 18:00 PM

Down the rabbit hole of science and art

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.
13 November 2024, 18:00 PM

Taking folk melodies of Bangladesh to the world

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.
13 November 2024, 18:00 PM