Book review: Fiction / Satgaon as memory: Reading ‘Satgaoner Haoatantira’

14 June 2026, 18:53 PM Fiction review
Time in Satgaoner Haoatantira does not move in a straight line. The story shifts backward and forward across centuries. Past and present overlap. One generation’s memory suddenly opens into another’s history. Events surface in fragments rather than sequence. Bhattacharya is not interested in arranging the past neatly. He is interested in showing how history survives in lived memory--broken, layered, uncertain, and emotionally charged.
Reflections / In the age of AI allegations
13 June 2026, 00:00 AM Reflection
Fiction / A doll’s coat
13 June 2026, 00:00 AM ⁠⁠Fiction
Poetry / Phenomenon
13 June 2026, 00:00 AM ⁠⁠Poetry
Event Report / DEH-ULAB hosts Earth Day 2026 talk on climate fiction and water issues
22 April 2026, 18:41 PM
As part of the university’s 2026 Earth Day celebration, the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (DEH-ULAB) organized a book discussion event on Tuesday, April 21, centered on climate fiction (cli-fi) and how fiction can provide not only parallels and premonitions for our present and future but also bring a wider audience’s attention to perhaps the single most important issue of our time. The event, titled “Lines on a Drying Map: Communities, Conflict, Currents, and Cli-Fi”
NEWS REPORT / “Six books that reverberate with history, humanity, heartbreak, and hope”: 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist announced
2 April 2026, 17:32 PM
The 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, recognizing six outstanding works of fiction from around the world translated into English. The award, known formerly as the Man Booker International Prize, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

Bookcentric announces September 2021 reading challenge

Dhaka’s Bookcentric library has announced their September 2021 reading challenge in collaboration with Daily Star Books. For this month, Bookcentric will look at books that feature a “utopia” or, conversely, a “dystopia”, given their thematic similarities, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) to Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), among others.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM

Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi': How real is the world we imagine?

In the 1700s, there lived an Italian artist, architect, and archaeologist who saw in the world far more than what was in it. Giovanni Battista Piranesi captured his world, among other things, through prints: the most famous of which are the Views, an imitation of the classical remains of Rome, and the imaginary renditions of the Prisons.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM

Jalal-Ud-Din Ahmad: A headmaster’s memoir

Pursuit of Excellence in Teaching: A Memoir (University Press Limited, 2021) chronicles the life and legacy of Jalal-Ud-Din Ahmad, a gifted educator who grew up to be the first graduate in his village in Feni, East Pakistan, and whose humble beginnings culminated in his winning the Presidential Award for “Best Headmaster in Pakistan” in 1967.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM

JCB Prize for Literature announces 2021 longlist

The annual competition, which has been hailed as “India's most valuable literature prize”, offers INR 2,500,000 (USD 35,000) to its winner for distinguished work of fiction by an Indian writer working in or translated to English.
8 September 2021, 07:28 AM

Hardback edition released of ‘Inherited Memories’, Goethe-Institut and Zubaan Books’ project on the 1947 partition

Zubaan Books has released a hardback edition of Inherited Memories: Third Generation Perspectives on Partition in the East, concerning the still-felt ramifications of the 1947 partition.
5 September 2021, 11:37 AM

Story of Bengal and Bengalis: The Bengali Homeland and its Inhabitants

With the onset of the new millennium in the 21st century, there seems to be a revival of interest in the space, in the eastern part of South Asia, historically known as Bengal, and the people who inhabit this space, the Bengalis.
3 September 2021, 18:00 PM

FEMALE WARRIORS

I had decided to write a brief review of Selima Chowdhury’s book when it was first published, but what with one thing or another making me put it off, a couple of years rolled by, and we found ourselves caught up in a pandemic with no end in sight.
3 September 2021, 18:00 PM

ABUL MANSUR AHMAD: Our Language and our Literature

On the occasion of the birth anniversary of author, journalist, and politician Abul Mansur Ahmad (1898-1979) on September 3, 2021, we publish an excerpt from his essay, "Our Language and Our Literature", first published in The Concept magazine in 1965 and later collected in the book, 'End of a Betrayal and Restoration of Lahore Resolution' (1975).
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM

Radio, ghazals, and “Islami gaan”: What Nazrul’s shift to music said about his syncretism

The adoption of the ghazal by Nazrul, with renewed fervour in the late ’20s and ’30s, signaled an understanding that his earlier literary and linguistic world was an impermanent one, as was a politics in which the unity of Hindus and Muslims was achieved through an appeal to a shared culture and language.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM

Radhika Singha's 'The Coolie's Great War': The forgotten ones of World War I

As of December 31, 1919, a total of 1.4 million Indians were recruited to various theatres of the First World War. Among them, approximately 563,369 were “followers or non-combatants”.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM

Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’: Fragments of an uprooted people

The people we meet in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (Viking, 2021) are haunted by terrible tragedies from several years past, by a beautiful island divided into two.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM

BOOKCENTRIC READING CHALLENGE: Readers review nautical books

From August 2021, Daily Star Books was excited to have joined Bookcentric’s monthly reading challenge, which invites readers to read and review books following each month’s designated theme. Under August’s theme of books with nautical themes, here is what our readers read—and reviewed—last month!
1 September 2021, 12:53 PM

In ‘Toward Happy Civilization’, a portrait of desperation

Typical of any Samanta Schweblin story from her International Booker-longlisted collection, Mouthful of Birds (OneWorld, 2019), a sense of anxiety is strongly perceptible here, especially through the characters Fi and Pe. One grows afraid of them as they start showing both lovingly caring and Big Brother-like tendencies. What heightens the ominous halo surrounding these two is the hostages’ inability to translate their emotions; why would someone who provides for you not give you a way out?
31 August 2021, 15:03 PM

At long last, a ‘Foundation’

Originally published as a series of short stories in the 1940s, the Foundation series—expanded later with a string of prequels and sequels—became Asimov’s greatest contribution to the genre and remains, to this day, one of the greatest reads for any SF connoisseur. 
30 August 2021, 07:28 AM

Writer and diplomat Ataur Rahman no more

Ataur Rahman, well known humour writer, diplomat, and former director general of the postal department, passed away from a Coronavirus infection yesterday. He was 79 years old. 
29 August 2021, 07:40 AM

Writer Sheikh Abdul Hakim passes away

Renowned author and translator Sheikh Abdul Hakim passed away at his Madartek residence in Dhaka yesterday afternoon.
28 August 2021, 18:00 PM

How I found my voice as a debut author

Being accused of copying Humayun made me want to create something of my own, something that wouldn’t be considered mainstream, but nor would it be too out of the box. I wanted to reflect on realism.
28 August 2021, 11:50 AM

Submissions for 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize to open September 1

The prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition returns for its 11th iteration, opening its doors for short story submissions from September 1 to November 1, 2021 (11:59pm in any time zone). 
28 August 2021, 05:55 AM

On Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns Germs and Steel was first published in 1997 and received the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year. Reading this book has been an incredible experience. Each time I put the book down for the day I had to gasp for air because I had been totally immersed, rather like deep sea diving and looking at the world in a new dimension.
27 August 2021, 18:00 PM

Brothers with the lyrical names

I arrived in Islamabad as a schoolboy along with my family from Dhaka in January,1968. The new capital city of Pakistan was still in its nascent stage of development.
27 August 2021, 18:00 PM
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