FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

“We tried our best to keep the shop but the tides of change are upon us”, Bookworm announced on their social media today. 

I once thought it was impossible to present the magnitude of the novel on stage.

When you go to a book-store, it is often difficult to choose from the plethora of newly released books available. The following list should help when deciding what new books to buy.

“The liberation war was terrifying for women and this is why Afsan Chowdhury’s book is crucial. It is important to study our culture to understand the history of our liberation war,” said Professor Sonia Nishat Amin.

When being asked how she finds the time to read, she shared that she reads backstage or in the backseat of her car, on her way to meetings or interviews, “especially if I’m into a book”.

Now late at night you have a bed A quiet and dark room Placidity and silence Think of nothing more

No respite these resplendent summers, beads of light sweating down streetlamps into gutters, aarati cinders simmer in pistons. You trawl your bone-dry fountain

By 1954 Jibanananda Das, after years of neglect, was beginning to gain increasing attention as a poet all over Bengal—East or West—and had a steady teaching job after a long, long time. Indeed, in 1953 he had been awarded the Rabindra-Smriti Puroshkar for his book of verse, Banalata Sen. In May, 1954 his Jibanananda Dasher Shreshto Kobita came out from a reasonably good publishing house, collecting his best poems.

The poems varied from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.

Despite the regret I felt for not studying them with honest academic interest, the goal of having to go through those academic books did provide me a sense of purpose. However, now that exams were over, I realised that I had to replace those mundane books with more fascinating ones.

After a ten-year long hiatus, Monica Ali has returned with Love-Marriage that has has caused quite a stir.

A "what it really was" analysis of the 1971 war does not mean the description of the actions of India only. It should also cover their mistakes and failures. The cover of this book claims to be a "definitive story", but its research and narrative are not holistic.

“What Men Live By” opens like a children’s story—the way Matilda or most Roald Dahl books would start out—with simple, everyday events and straightforward descriptions. Eventually, though, one line caught my attention and I couldn’t help but smile:

For women looking for answers in Bangladesh, abortion is not legal, but menstrual regulation is. You will face questions about your marital status. You might be turned away if the status is not right.

A long time ago, when I was a young writer who had just published his first collection of short stories and had just been married to a young and lovely woman, I wrote a love story in the first person, which created two unanticipated problems.

The stories occur in places deeply etched into many of our memories—from rooftops to buses to benches in the park to the digital world of emails and texts.

In a break from last year’s partially virtual format, this year’s event will be held at ULAB’s Permanent Campus in Beribad and its Research Building in Dhanmondi, Dhaka.

The novel opens with a photographer, the eponymous Maali Almeida, who has woken up dead in a celestial visa office, while his body sinks in the Beira Lake in Colombo. Maali has seven moons to find the man and woman he loves and lead them to  "a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka".

The movie tells the classic love story from the perspective of Juliet's cousin Rosaline, who happens to be Romeo's recent ex-girlfriend. Crushed when Romeo meets Juliet and begins to pursue her, Rosaline schemes to foil the famous romance and reclaim her man.

To me, Wilde’s novel articulates the deepest anxieties of the late Victorians and continues to offer us ways to interpret our own experiences.