BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / To pick or not to pick a bone
19 June 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
Reading Ghost-Eye felt similar to casually dating someone whose family and friends are more exciting and fascinating than the person themselves.
Book Review: Fiction / When ‘Little Women’ turns to murder: Katie Bernet reimagines a classic
19 June 2026, 00:00 AM
Fiction review
The Shelf / The quiet grief of becoming ordinary
19 June 2026, 00:00 AM
The Shelf
The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days
18 June 2026, 17:04 PM
The Shelf
News Report / NSU DEML offers certificate course in creative writing for the second time
16 June 2026, 22:03 PM
News
Book review: Fiction / Satgaon as memory: Reading ‘Satgaoner Haoatantira’
14 June 2026, 18:53 PM
Fiction review
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
Alt-lit / What you can’t remember will definitely hurt you: Antimemes and qntm’s Antimemetics SCP saga
How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?
News Report / Marjane Satrapi, voice of exile and resistance, dies at 56
4 June 2026, 17:58 PM
Event Report / Dhaka Zine Mela 2026: A celebration of creativity and community
11 June 2026, 17:39 PM
Interview / Kishwar Chowdhury on Bangali culture and culinary storytelling
11 June 2026, 00:00 AM
Interview / Diaspora, national identity and reality TV with Pajtim Statovci
9 June 2026, 21:48 PM
Interview / Faith, patriarchy, and resistance: Banu Mushtaq on ‘Heart Lamp’
7 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Banu Mushtaq, an Indian writer who writes in Kannada language, was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2025 for “exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society” in her collection of short stories, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories Publishing, 2024).
Event Report / DEML-NSU hosts closing ceremony for first cohort of its Creative Writing Certificate Course
27 April 2026, 22:43 PM
North South University’s Department of English and Modern Languages (DEML) hosted the closing ceremony for its inaugural Certificate Course in Creative Writing on 25 April 2026. The event, executed successfully through the combined efforts of DEML faculties and students alike, was attended by Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Nasar U. Ahmed, Treasurer Prof. Abdur Rob Khan, and DEML Chair Dr Nazia Manzoor, among other distinguished faculty members of various departments at NSU.
Event Report / DEH-ULAB hosts Earth Day 2026 talk on climate fiction and water issues
22 April 2026, 18:41 PM
Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew
28 March 2026, 03:42 AM
Creative non-fiction
Children of 1972–73 came of age alongside Bangladesh itself. In Azimpur’s close‑knit colony, a telephone became a neighbourhood lifeline, television was a shared ritual, and the Buriganga was our afternoon escape.
FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali
20 March 2026, 20:20 PM
Essay / The Cosmere is getting adapted: Here is where to start reading
14 March 2026, 21:02 PM
CREATIVE NONFICTION / Sweetened ice and other lessons in kindness
14 March 2026, 01:59 AM
Essay / A meaningless world: Sartre, Camus, Waliullah, and Badal Sircar
14 March 2026, 01:48 AM
CREATIVE NONFICTION / The devil wears Maria B
7 March 2026, 02:13 AM
The shelf / 6 Books to contextualise the present conflict in the Gulf
1 March 2026, 21:07 PM
ESSAY / Romance, radical hope, and the modern happily ever after
27 February 2026, 00:05 AM
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
A book’s plea for a better internet
“Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1999.
5 August 2020, 18:00 PM
Conversations from the Daily Star Book Club
On the Daily Star Book Club last week, we asked members how they organise and look after their book collections at home. Here is what we learned:
29 July 2020, 18:00 PM
'Once Upon An Eid': A rare glimpse into Muslim homes
Diversity can seem jaded when it is employed for the sake of appearing “woke”.
29 July 2020, 18:00 PM
Technicolour Mughals: Ira Mukhoty brings Akbar to life
Humans are a storytelling species. Yet history, which is but the stories of yesteryears, is taught like a chain of facts and dates.
29 July 2020, 18:00 PM
in a sleepless trance
I hold stares - I sing to the moon
Rigid, motionless - senseless woes
24 July 2020, 18:00 PM
The Retirement
The human race is doing quite well. There was a possibility of a climate catastrophe in the early 21st century but they came to their senses soon enough and managed to deal with it by 2050.
24 July 2020, 18:00 PM
Himadri Lahiri’s Diaspora Theory and Transnationalism
The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017) co-edited by Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson made significant observations about the increase in global movement of people, capital, products, cultures and ideologies;
24 July 2020, 18:00 PM
The Bengali summer read
Come June, the season of light reading arrives with the promise of filling lazy afternoons freed from school work or, for adults who can’t manage a vacation, escape in the form of relaxing books.
22 July 2020, 18:00 PM
Rizia Rahman, an antidote to apathy
For lovers of short story collections, Rizia Rahman’s Char Doshoker Golpo (2011) can be great company on lazy afternoons. Rahman is undoubtedly among the finest writers of literature in Bangladesh, yet her craft goes unnoticed by many from the younger generations today.
22 July 2020, 18:00 PM
Bibhutibhushan, an unlikely adventurer
For anyone sitting through heat-stricken afternoons on forever-long summer days, reprieve can come in the form of escape into a fictional world, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is a master at offering it.
22 July 2020, 18:00 PM
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