News Report / From the ashes: Gaza’s first grassroots library rises amid genocide

12 April 2026, 21:43 PM ⁠⁠News
Two Palestinian writers, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim Massri, have been working since late 2025 to build a library in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. The Phoenix Library is located in the heart of Gaza City and, per a post from the library’s Twitter/X account, is fast approaching its official opening date despite the Gaza Strip and all of occupied Palestine still being subject to Israeli apartheid violence.
EVENT REPORT / Unveiling ‘The July Resolve': Stories of resilience & resistance
14 January 2026, 16:01 PM Books & Literature
On the chilly afternoon of January 10, Bookworm Bangladesh, in collaboration with Voices Shaping Society, hosted the book launch of The July Resolve, a collection of 36 narratives that depicts the strength and struggles of people from all walks of life during the Monsoon Revolution of 2024.
EVENT REPORT / NSU DEML Winter Fest 2025 celebrates storytelling, art, and youth voices
14 December 2025, 08:17 AM Books & Literature
North South University’s Department of English and Modern Languages (DEML) concluded its first-ever Winter Fest spanning December 10-11, bringing together literature, performance, film, and visual art in a two-day celebration of creative expression on campus.

Substitute Cook

Last November, our elderly maid servant Fatema’s ma who works full-time at our house, wanted to take leave to get her son married. Of course, I agreed immediately. But she would be gone for about two weeks and hence she proposed that her eldest son’s wife might work in her absence.
21 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Poetry

The river wept, as we left But its tears were not for us.
21 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Moving On

Flowers on Facebook — Violet, red, yellow, orange — splashed a welcome into a garden never visited
21 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Maya

I’m telling you amidst the whispering cropped-headed paddy field, in the lore of these reeds, in the orchestra of these auburn after-harvest field by the seedlings that crack this soil-- I am their spokesperson.
21 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Humanity, freedom, and magic realism in the face of authoritarian powers in Iran

The novel is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl. Bahar died in a fire after her family home—a secular and intellectual space—in Tehran is stormed by fanatics.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

SHUTTER STORIES: Books to read on World Photography Day

Ironically a book without images or photographs, On Photography collects American philosopher, filmmaker and activist Susan Sontag’s essays on the history of photography, its inherent voyeurism, and how it affects the way we perceive and experience the modern world through an often capitalist lens.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Are we reading ‘A Seaman’s Wife’ the right way?

Something that has always fascinated me about Bangladeshi literature is it’s attachment to and exploration of space—be it in prose, poetry, or music, almost all Bangladeshi and even Bengali literary work engages with how we are impacted by land, home, country, season, and other natures of charged atmosphere.
19 August 2020, 18:00 PM

A Burning: Good Books Are Hard to Read

Good books – even as they are arresting – are often hard to read. This is not because they are difficult in themselves so much because oftheir content.
14 August 2020, 18:00 PM

I’m Not Here to Shed Blood this Day

Like everyone else present here, I, too am so fond of roses,
14 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Poetry of Nirmalendu Goon

How Freedom Became Our Own Word
14 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Has young adult fantasy become rote as a genre?

Everyone had them on their bookshelves. Everyone read them and fawned over them. Online stores were getting creative with the contents of these young-adult fantasy books, coming up with themed candles, beautifully designed bookmarks, and exclusive sticker packs. It was almost as though the genre had developed a cult following of its own.
13 August 2020, 10:49 AM

The road not taken, in books

One day many years ago, discovering my cousin’s tattered copy of a Give Yourself Goosebumps book completely changed my ideas about what books could be.
12 August 2020, 18:00 PM

The fires of Partition in East Bengal

Three years before Maloy Krishna Dhar’s death, his memoir, Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal (Penguin India, 2009), came out. Born in a sleepy village of Kamalpur in the Bhairab-Mymensingh region next to Meghna and Brahmaputra, Dhar had an illustrious career as a teacher, journalist, intelligence officer, and writer.
12 August 2020, 18:00 PM

To stitch a tapestry of trauma: Material memories of the Partition of India

A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had.
12 August 2020, 18:00 PM

For a Pinch of Life

A damp siren screamed at the rushing wind. Black and thick smoky clouds slowly clotted in a grey sky, as if preparing for some kind of a ritual.
7 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Politicking with Pain

I can’t sleep anymore Piano. Storms. White noise Nothing works.
7 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Diary of Pandemic Days

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.
7 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Beyond the pages of Anne Frank’s diary

On the first day of this month, 76 years ago, Anne Frank wrote her last diary entry. Three days later, on August 4, the building she was hiding in with her family and four family friends was raided by the Gestapos.
7 August 2020, 09:30 AM

'Shirley' crystallises Shirley Jackson’s contested legacy

Shirley (2020), directed by Josephine Decker and adapted by Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 eponymous novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, interweaves fact and fiction into an imagined narrative about the time when author Shirley Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman (1951).
5 August 2020, 18:00 PM

Earth calls the soul in ‘Inner State’

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
5 August 2020, 18:00 PM
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