FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

As we commemorate Begum Rokeya Day, Oborodh Bashini stands not as a relic of a bygone era but as a living blueprint for modern resistance. The stories she told are specific to a time, but the structures of silencing they represent are hauntingly familiar.

In a wilting summer swelter of 1797 in London, a name was born twice–mother Mary Wollstonecraft wound the clock of daughter Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin)’s life, for the very first time.

The Little Boy.He sold magic .mostly for free, .wrapped in candy wrappers, .joy and spring-coloured rosettes, .and, at times, priced at .a few tufts of dandelion threads.

Students at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (ULAB) crowded into a packed classroom on a winter morning on Sunday, November 30, awaiting the start of a program that would be part interview, part poetry reading. “Meet the Poet: Shaheen Dil—In Conversation with Dr Mushira Habib” organised by the Department of English and Humanities was an hour-long dive into the life and work of poet Dr Shaheen Dil, a Bangladeshi writer and retired academic, banker, and consultant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Fiction has long chronicled that women have always worked more than what is counted, felt more than what is acknowledged, and lost more than what anyone will ever quantify.

If you have ever carried a tote bag to a coffee shop solely to place it on the table next to a freshly prepared matcha latte, you already know the assignment. Reading, in the modern era, isn’t really about “reading” or enjoying a story—it is about signaling. It is about letting the person seated at the next table know that while you could be doomscrolling TikTok, you choose to instead engage with a higher form of brain simulation.

All’s Well circles one maddening question: what does pain need to look like before someone finally believes you? And how do you stop before it gets too discomfortable?

The unnamed You can get lost trying to  get back to the exit at the Vatican Museum. 

There is always a subtle tension when a story migrates across cultures. Some narratives travel with the lightness of wind, reshaping themselves almost effortlessly inside new imaginations, while others arrive heavy with the weight of the worlds that first produced them.

Some books explain immigrant life through nostalgia. Others through big dramatic events. Sharbari Ahmed does neither in <I>The Strangest of Fruit</I>. Her stories focus on the quieter things like small humiliations, awkward encounters, the private wounds people carry, and the memories they don’t

The author of this book is the protagonist of a charming inter-cultural romance. He is one of fewer than a handful of living Westerners who fortuitously fell in love with Bengali literature and made a distinguished career of teaching it—at the University of Chicago in his case.

If the girls we read about could speak today, their voices would be both sharp and unflinching.

To understand the deep-seated relevance of this modern debate, we must embark on a journey into the heart of Sarat Chandra’s literature, where these battles first found voice.

Gupta shares her insights on reclaiming forgotten histories, reimagining myths, and connecting ancient narratives to contemporary ecological and social concerns.

Shell-shocked, I talked to the office staff. They all looked sad, a little perplexed too, perhaps seeing my very unusual, distressed face.

These two things—the river and the train—continue to haunt and fascinate me.

Buried beneath masses of mangled bodies of countless innocents slowly pulled from the shrapnel and debris, their remaining flesh torn in the extraction, lies a reflection of the world’s inhumanity.

I first heard Taylor Swift’s song “The Fate of Ophelia” on the radio during a road trip to New Hampshire the day after it was released on October 3.

For the Class of ’69 at Dhaka University, that bond was embodied in one man—Syed Mayeenul Huq. He wasn’t just a friend; he was the quiet, steady centre that held their entire constellation together.

“Graveyard Shift” is a highly anticipated work by M L Rio, following her success with If We Were Villains (Flatiron Books), released in 2017. Like its predecessor, the novella “Graveyard Shift” also stays in the realm of dark academia; however, the similarities between the two books end there.