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Bangladesh has suffered the terrible luck of having to deal with authoritarianism several times since its inception, most recently under the Awami League from 2009 to 2024.

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.

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.

Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977). 

In Good Material, Dolly Alderton uses her sharp humor and keen observations to explore the challenges of adulthood.

Our Stories, Our Struggles: Violence and the Lives of Women (Speaking Tiger Books, 2024) is an anthology edited by Mitali Chakravarty and Ratnottama Sengupta.

Review of ‘Deadly Class’ (first published in 2014 by Image Comic), created and written by Rick Remender

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.

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

Review of ‘Renegotiating Patriarchy’ (LSE Press, 2024) by Naila Kabeer

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally published in 1967) has long been heralded as a masterpiece of magical realism and a cornerstone of Latin American literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These nuanced characterisations of those who have suffered terribly and are desperately trying to rebuild themselves are what have kept me hooked to the series.

In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime.