The book invites you to revel in the world of legends, to dream as you once did as a child.

As 2025 rolls around, spelling yet another year of reading about writing and writing about reading, we asked the Star Books and Literature family to share their top writing tips for our readers.

Although the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent and sovereign state is a fact of recent history, this country has been the home of an ancient civilization.

Rebel forces, particularly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA), carried out an offensive that ended the 50 years of the Assad family’s authoritarian rule in Syria. An armed coalition, supported by both state and non-state actors, was involved in this offensive.

In digital age, personal data fuels the online ecosystem while also raising privacy concerns. To address this issue, Bangladesh aims to strengthen its data privacy framework by adopting the draft Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (PDPA).

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.

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).

The phrases “cyber safety” and “cyber lives” may seem vague and not very well understood among Bangladesh’s netizens.

From family structures to politico-legal frameworks, deeply rooted patriarchal views have historically influenced every aspect of life.

The notion that a safe and healthy environment can be a right may still sound new to us.

There are many critical human rights issues of Bangladeshi healthcare workers who went to the United Kingdom (UK) under the Health and Care (HC) worker visa scheme.

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.

Rape and other sexual crimes are largely misunderstood because people refuse to understand or fail to understand why they are crimes in the first place.

A very brief discussion of the possible legal steps to be taken by a rape victim are discussed in this piece.

The book named Impact of Gender on Custody, Guardianship, and Adoption authored by Professor Dr. Taslima Monsoor and Dr. Sridevi Thambapillay is an important cross-country study. In this book, the authors undertake a careful comparative study on how gender influences the practice of family law within Bangladesh and Malaysia, under Islamic law, in particular.

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.

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

More than a century ago, revered Bengali writer Begum Rokeya in her short story Sultana’s Dream had visualized futuristic inventions like solar cookers, atmospheric water generators and flying air-cars. She dreamt of Ladyland as a feminist utopia without crime, the death penalty and epidemics. Here men were shut indoors and responsible for childcare and household chores, while women with “quicker” brains pursued science and shaped inventions.

Patriarchy would have you believe that women are inherently complicated—creatures who must be defined, boxed in, or reduced to stereotypes.