FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

The Three-Body Problem is the first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2006) trilogy by Cixin Liu, a renowned Chinese author.

As long-awaited summer showers arrive to offer respite from the sweltering heat we have been experiencing, here are a few books to accompany you as you cosy up in bed and watch the rain beat down on your windows.

I recently had the sublime experience of watching the recent adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (Chilton Books, 1965), a 2021 and 2023 two-part movie series directed by the passionate Denis Villeneuve. It is, in my mind, a cinematic triumph, and I am thrilled to witness the surge interest these movies have driven for Herbert’s science fiction book series of the same name.

As we continue to grapple with questions of identity, meaning, and societal change, Blake's visionary oeuvre serves as a guiding light

Smith’s framing runs into the same blind spot in other criticisms levelled at student protests, i.e. it detaches the student’s cause from the activists, academics, and journalists, Palestinian or otherwise, who have been documenting Israel’s settler colonial project for 75 years.

When there’s a lull in the air, I get the feeling that I’ve scraped the bottom of my fleshy insides.

Dust patterns have gathered around my landline phone, huddling around the maroon. my fingerprints take some dust off of it, and they rejoice.

The mosque committee was quite displeased with Rashed, their young muezzin.

The latest offering from the online literary journal feels, in many respects, like their most polished work yet

Anisul Hoque’s Kokhono Amar Maa-ke is the story of appalling sacrifices made by a mother and her unwavering determination to secure a bright future for her children.

Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures. 

Navigating the lines between gender politics, feminist beliefs and love for romance

The following are podcasts that focus on POC writers, a list made because of the heavy Eurocentrism still present in the lists and bookstores known around Bangladesh.

The beloved writer and activist passed away on May 11, 2024

You called me close in the moments of grace/ Veiling my delicate senses

You know how that day the wind brought out/ The crazy thoughts I had in me all the while.

I wove necklaces of lyrics/ Which you'd wear beautifully

The English poet W.B. Yeats once expressed his profound admiration for Rabindranath Tagore, describing him as “someone greater than any of us”.

Buckets of water I pour on my head; my vision gets blurry./ "The blurrier, the merrier", my mother said.

Articles on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last novel to be published by his sons against the author’s wishes built up my anticipation and I couldn’t wait for April to arrive. Thanks to Bookworm, I got my copy the moment they had it in store and I read it twice. It didn’t impress me the first time as it was just a string of chapters describing how a promiscuous woman drove herself into the arms of different men on her annual August 16 visits to a Caribbean island.