The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

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).

The winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, recognising publications, publication staff, individual journalists, and authors across 23 award categories for journalism, reporting, criticism, photography, authorship, and overall excellence in their fields. The winners for each category were announced on May 4,2026 via live broadcasts on the Pulitzer Prizes website and YouTube channel.

Bengali literature had already seen its fair share of tall-tale storytellers—most notably Ghana Da by Premendra Mitra and Tenny Da by Narayan Gangopadhyay. Tarinicharan Banerjee, or Tarini Khuro, is not entirely different in essence. He lives in Beniatola Lane and walks to Ballygunge to narrate his stories to a group of eager listeners—among them Poltu, the narrator, and Napla, a slightly rebellious boy who delights in interrupting him. As I read those stories late into the night, I found myself, willingly or not, becoming the sixth member of their circle.

That censorship is not only malign but also stupid and, in the long run, futile, is a lesson that every tinpot dictator and overzealous bureaucrat has to learn afresh.

One of the most interesting adaptations that I have read recently is the 2025 novel I, Medusa by African American novelist Ayana Gray.

When I was younger, I would wait for days like these with a kind of breathless excitement. My cousins and I would run out with buckets to collect the first hailstones, laughing as they bounced off the floor and stung our fingers with their tiny, icy weight. To my five-year-old self, they felt like strange little creatures dropped from another world, cold and impossible to hold for long before they slipped back into the water.

On her birth centenary, Harper Lee’s spare canon endures as a vast moral inheritance

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.

Every word I write is contemporary  My pain is urban

It always felt like modernity flatters itself with a simple story: history moves from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from inherited authority to critique.

The rooftop is where she breathes.

Thorns in My Quilt (Rupa Publications India, 2024) unfolds through address rather than disclosure. Written as a series of letters to her father, Mohua Chinappa’s memoir traces memory not as a sequence of events, but as an emotional inheritance shaped by silence, expectation, and the subtle negotiations that govern family life.

Does our society support free thinking or blindly imitate patriarchy, prejudices, and silence? Humayun Azad was one of the most controversial writers, professors, and researchers in Bangladesh.

The more a reader learns to seek meaning, the more alone they may feel in a world of easy distractions

How exile, memory and aesthetic daring made him one of literature’s most intoxicating minds

As part of the university’s 2026 Earth Day celebration, the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (DEH-ULAB) organized a book discussion event on Tuesday, April 21, centered on climate fiction (cli-fi) and how fiction can provide not only parallels and premonitions for our present and future but also bring a wider audience’s attention to perhaps the single most important issue of our time. The event, titled “Lines on a Drying Map: Communities, Conflict, Currents, and Cli-Fi”

I slip into your hut and salvage bones, a soul,

We know Body Selim. If you look around, you’ll find that after this incident, many people came to know him through the newspapers.

Aruna Chakravarti is a doyen of historical fiction, spinning out narratives on the Bengal Renaissance with her Jorasanko (HarperCollins, 2013) novels, reviving the story of the Bhawal Prince with The Mendicant Prince (Pan Macmillan, 2022) and doing series of fictitious short stories based on chronicles from the past.