Romance has never existed apart from inequality. The genre depends on distance—on obstacles that make love feel hard-won.

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.

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

In classical studies of sensory experiences, philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggest that bodily sensations constitute our lived reality.

I’ve always been fascinated by what stories can tell us about the inner lives (what men like to call the private sphere) of women throughout history.

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.

Just as Bengali women played an important role in the Liberation War, they also played a fearless role in the movement for the Bangla language before it, participating alongside men as fellow warriors.

In addition to today’s transnational corporations and the global explosion of their advertisements, the works of William Shakespeare and Karl Marx keep teaching us a great deal about the relationship between money and language.

For years, speculative dystopian fiction has trained readers to expect the worst: scorched planets, collapsing governments, ruthless technologies, and futures where survival is the only victory left. Solarpunk pushes back against that narrative. Instead of asking how the world ends, it asks a far more radical question: what if we fix it? What if cities worked with nature instead of against it? What if technology served communities, not corporations? And what if hope wasn’t naive, but necessary?

Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Bangla poem “Bidrohi” (first published in January 1922), in Bijli magazine during British colonial rule, is more than just anti-imperialist literature—it is a striking philosophical rendition.

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.

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 the girls we read about could speak today, their voices would be both sharp and unflinching.

To understand the deep-seated relevance of this modern debate, we must embark on a journey into the heart of Sarat Chandra’s literature, where these battles first found voice.

I first heard Taylor Swift’s song “The Fate of Ophelia” on the radio during a road trip to New Hampshire the day after it was released on October 3.

My readings of the two books—the subject of this write-up—happened to be on two momentous occasions, set two decades apart in utterly contrasting ways.

Heathcliff portrays a very unique strain of masculinity. It is not one that comes from being a man in a patriarchal society, nor from one being amongst majority women.

It’s very likely that Substack will become the “drawing room” of intellectuals and creative elites.

Before he was “Leonard Cohen—the celebrated singer”, he was “Cohen, the poet”.

The refusal to write beautifully is often justified in the name of neutrality, of detachment, of discipline.