You know when the sky trades its brightness for a low, silver hue, and you wrap your fingers tightly around your tea, seeking that small, steady pulse of warmth. This is the essence of healing fiction. Often rooted in the Japanese concept of iyashikei, these stories focus on the quiet spirit through small, everyday moments. You may have already heard of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop or We’ll Prescribe You a Cat. While those popular favourites have opened a door for many, there are a few other tales worth the read.

Last year, a friend showed me how a certain portal kept flagging his grad school application essay as written by AI.

In 1970s Azimpur, the two Eids and Durga Puja were the punctuation marks of our year—days when stairwells, verandas, and a single playground turned many flats into one home.

Though his characters breathe through very human emotions, yearning, hesitation, separation, regret, Tagore lifts love gently away from the limits of the human hand. It becomes something inwardly vast, where feeling matters more than outcome, and presence matters more than possession. This is why his lovers often come close, yet never arrive.

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

One of the most interesting adaptations that I have read recently is the 2025 novel I, Medusa by African American novelist Ayana Gray.

We know Body Selim. If you look around, you’ll find that after this incident, many people came to know him through the newspapers.

Two Bangladeshi writers—26-year-old Anmana Manishita, a lecturer at BRAC University, and 33-year-old Shazed Ul Hoq Abir, a lecturer at East West University—have been shortlisted for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Children of 1972–73 came of age alongside Bangladesh itself. In Azimpur’s close‑knit colony, a telephone became a neighbourhood lifeline, television was a shared ritual, and the Buriganga was our afternoon escape.

The scramble was almost instantaneous and without mercy. Men in freshly tailored panjabis—stitched for the next morning's prayers—threw elbows for the simple right to go back home.

Earlier this year, Brandon Sanderson finalised what has been described as an “unprecedented deal” with Apple TV+ to adapt his Cosmere universe for film and television, specifically his Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive series. For years, Hollywood had shown interest in acquiring the rights to his massive fantasy catalogue. But they could not guarantee him creative control. This is the biggest reason Sanderson had not sold the rights until now. With this Apple TV+ deal, Sanderson gets full creative power and will oversee each project personally.

A few days ago on a dreary, grey Sunday, as I was busy with my weekend chores and preparing for the week ahead, I received a call from my sister.

Existentialism is a philosophical theory and a literary perspective. Its central proposition is that the world has no a priori meaning or purpose.

I sit on a chair. Sometimes I wish I were sitting on my old chair of humble plastic, but right now my chair is a plush armchair, with armrests no less, swaying and swooning on its cabriole legs of sturdy s-curve perfection.

Through essays on sanctions, the US intervention, protest movements, and media framing, he argues that misrepresentation and political calculation have sustained a “long war” beyond the battlefield

Few genres are as unapologetically optimistic as romance. At its core lies the Happily Ever After (HEA), a convention so fundamental that it often stands in for the genre itself.

As evening sets in and the stars begin to appear in the dark sky above the village, a sharp series of pops and bangs pierces through Xiaohui’s peace.

Even after the organisers and Bangla Academy offered a 55 percent subsidy on stall costs, a significant number of publishers maintained their decision to not participate.

Sometimes it sneaks up in ways you do not expect, like in the quiet chaos of a city street where rain drips off umbrellas, and the smell of frying snacks mingles with wet asphalt.

One of the great pleasures of reading enough of the plays of William Shakespeare is that, after a while, you feel like you know him. British actor Patrick Stewart famously stated, “...he feels like an old friend—someone who just went out [...] to get another bottle of wine.” While Shakespeare scholars have succeeded in creating a rough Shakespeare biography based on historical documents, many of them will admit that there are large gaps in our knowledge.