FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

Karina’s experiences are conveyed with compassion, emphasising the real issues of gender inequality in South Asian communities. The fact that parents continue to force their dreams on children instead of letting them pursue their own speaks volumes about the family dynamics existing in our households. Karina is seen to experiment with various ways of coping with anxiety instead of seeking professional help. Her experiences represent the glaring lack of mental health care in our community, even beyond national borders. That being said, the techniques Karina employs could be a helpful resource for readers suffering from similar issues. 

It was a hot August afternoon when I stood on the tarmac at the St Louis airport staring at the tiny 7-seater that looked like a toy plane. What? I thought. I would have to get on that? Was this some kind of a joke? Three other passengers were also waiting, but they seemed strangely unperturbed.

Where do you stand on this matter of pulling down statues, a hot topic during the ongoing Black and Indigenous Lives Matter campaigns? Do you favour putting up statues at all? Who, if anyone, would you put one up to?

At every step of her journey in the MasterChef kitchen—from her fried sardines with beetroot and blood orange to a date-nestled, ice cream infused paan and panta bhaat with aloo bhorta—Kishwar Chowdhury has talked about writing a cookbook for Bangladeshi recipes as her ultimate dream. In this episode of Star Book Talk, Daily Star Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari talks about food, books, and cookbooks with Kishwar Chowdhury.

To me, he was a weaver of stories from lands and cultures, all within Bangladesh, that I would never have heard of otherwise. Growing up abroad amidst mixed cultures and languages, Humayun Ahmed kept Bangladesh within me and in thousands of others like me.

The DS Books staff are thrilled about the return of the "Best Reads" series. Read on as we share our thoughts about the books, published in 2021, which made us escape into the most diverse of worlds (ones where the pandemic is a distant memory, if even that). While this list isnt exhaustive—it’s simply the books that have most stayed with us this year so far—it is complete with gut wrenching tales of heartbreak and wonderful stories of triumph, which transport the reader to the outside without requiring them to step outside our humble abodes.

I have had the opportunity of living for some time in Conrad’s fictional places, namely Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo) and Malaysia’s eastern province Sarawak’s adjoining country in Borneo Island, Brunei Darussalam.

To love a country as if you’ve lost one  Is to feel the freezing sun on your body Form icicles on your cheeks as you train your feet To dance hopscotch on rough asphalt;

A book may look like a house or a coffin But a maker of books cannot be contained between ordinary covers. Between the Muses’ minions, stodgy academics, Smarmy marketing men and discount-hungry retailers He waves a baton to conduct a chorus That threatens to collapse any moment into cacophony, Yet keeps the show going,

Rachel Clarke reminds us of the intensity of the ongoing tragedy in her autobiographical Breathtaking (Little, Brown, 2021), told from the extraordinary perspective of a palliative care doctor.

There is no better way to show someone that they are on your mind than to recommend a book you think they would love.

Iraq once boasted one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, encompassing 2,600 years of rich cultural history punctuated with moments of benign tolerance, blatant discrimination, and outright intolerance and persecution.

Amitav Ghosh’s passionate engagement with the Sundarbans has brought out his best as a socially conscious fashioner of narrative in The Hungry Tide (HarperCollins, 2004) and Gun Island (John Murray, 2019); enriched his intervention in the discourse on ecology, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin, 2016); and perhaps most felicitously, has brought to light the poet hiding behind his voluminous prose.

Md Tajdin Hassan and Shuvashish Roy, leaders of business development at The Daily Star, have jointly compiled and released a new book, Think Like CEOs (Daily Star Books, 2021), which seeks to impart management tips from 20 eminent business leaders of the country. Conducted from September 2020 through to February of this year, the interviews with the 20 CEOs took place virtually through a Facebook Live series called “The Chief Executive Show”, broadcasted on The Daily Star.

Be it the desolation in Tahrir Square or the barbarity of Islamist jihadis in Syria, what is the one thing common to each of these instances of violence and fury?

In an episode of Star Book Talk aired live on Friday, July 9, author-anthropologist Tahmima Anam and DS Books Editor Sarah Anjum Bari discussed Anam’s latest novel, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021). They discuss writing tactics, feminism in literature, and Anam’s influences on the path to becoming an award-winning author.

Central to Kim Bo-Young’s winning I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2021; transl. Sophie Bowman & Sung Ryu) are duality, symmetry, and (dis)harmony. This new four-story collection is divided right down its middle—where the first and fourth stories are continuations of one another, while the second and third merge to form a tessellation of one overarching narrative. In its 314 pages is a constellation of imagined lives, imagined realities, that try and verily succeed in drawing the reader into its bizarre, brilliant, and frequently confounding orbit. Bo-Young has done well in structuring the two main stories of the book, though the hooking nature of the first forces a halt when one turns the page over to the contemplative and shape-shifting second.

A launch event titled “Longing and Belonging, a collection of narratives on 1947 partition” was held virtually on Friday, 9 July on the Facebook pages of Goethe-Institut Bangladesh and Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata. Supported by the Goethe-Institut Bangladesh as part of its Inherited Memories project, Longing and Belonging “presents a collection of chronicles, fragments, stories, morsels of reflection from Indian émigrés living in Mirpur and Mohammadpur of Dhaka who or whose families were affected by the 1947 partition”. Friday’s event featured readings, discussions, reflections, and a poetry recitation in commemoration of this project, which spanned from the autumn of 2019 through to the eased COVID-19 lockdowns of late.

Shaheen Chishti, a descendant of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, and a London-based writer and women’s rights advocate, has just released his debut novel. The Grand Daughter Project (Nimble Books, 2021) touches upon a wide range of themes including gender inequality, racial oppression, war-time trauma, and female emancipation.

The first of the two-day memorial service for publisher emeritus Mohiuddin Ahmed was held at 7 PM on July 9. Family, friends, colleagues, and notable admirers gathered virtually to pay their respects to the late, great founder of the pioneering University Press Limited.