FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

He had lost touch almost completely with his craft, so much so that he wondered if he even had it in him. But even so, for the sake of writing, he wrote. When the pandemic hit, Helal batted off the dust of his desk and sat down to write. Sitting from a foreign land, the ink flowed again.

Amar Dekha Rajnitir Ponchash Bochhor unfolds a very complex process of how the people create cultures, how cultures create political orders, how orders lead to the formation of political parties, how these parties engage with political activities, and how this in turn shapes the central powers in a state.

The free, year-long fellowship for creative writers from South Asia, is accepting applications until September 30, 2022. 

Free to enter and open to any citizen, aged 18 and over, of a Commonwealth country, the prize accepts short story entries written in English and translated to English, as well as stories written in Bangla, Chinese, French, Greek, Kiswahili, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Tamil and Turkish languages. 

Poignant lines on wishful death

Helal Hafiz has been suffering from glaucoma for a long time, alongside complications with his kidney, diabetes and nerve complications.

What point is Lord of the Rings making in 2022? That people are racist and wage wars? The original trilogy, from two decades ago, was making that same point.

If sunflowers shone in the sky and clouds floated in lakes,

A politician and journalist by profession, Abul Mansur Ahmad began his career as a National Congress worker in Bengal.

The entire country was submerged in water. The countryside was completely flooded. In some places the tinned roofs of houses or some bamboo poles rose out of the waters to announce the presence of human residence.

The song “Shada Shada Kala Kala” seems almost like a visual rendition of “the merry minstrelsy” that breaks out in front of the bride as red as a rose.

Zahir uses crows as a symbol of magic realism, as found in local folklore, where animals serve as omens of luck both good and bad. The crows seem to bring bad luck to the couple, and wherever they go, the birds follow.

In May 2022, Joanna Chiu won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for her debut nonfiction book, China Unbound: A New World Disorder (Hurst, November 2021).

Prolific writer, novelist, and pioneer of postmodern fiction in Bangla literature, Shahidul Zahir, is known for the unique practice of magic realism in his works.

James seems to be saying to the establishment, to the same generous folks who once gave him the Booker and propelled him to the stratosphere: Go ahead and say this is not literature, I dare you. 

A love poem

Chulbul, who has written 29 books of poetry in his career spanning 9 months, characterises his style as introspective, post-modernist neo-absurdism.

Hermit-crab fiction use ready-made templates such as recipes, shopping lists, meeting minutes and other forms and is a great way for experimenting with form in short fiction.

The book contains important research on the type of language used by mainstream media in reporting news of rape, torture, and abuse of women.

“What’s the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend’s life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What’s the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late?"