Language and education are prime markers in identifying one’s participation in society and politics. Having just commemorated the International Mother Language Day on February 21, that too on the verge of our nation’s silver jubilee, it is perhaps a unique opportunity for us to question, reflect, and make changes to our politics on language, education, and social identities.

Vivek Oji, the titular character in Akwaeke Emezi’s second novel, is dead; this is stated in the title, the first line, and throughout the book. However, in every chapter, Vivek keeps coming alive, images of him rising out of the text’s surface only to dissolve again.

Olpo Kothar Golpo Gaan includes 200 of these iconic songs.

On February 22, 2021, The British Library hosted “Sultana’s Dream: Contemporary Fiction of Bangladeshi Origin”, a free virtual session on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopian novella.

Fuleshwary Priyanandini recounted the stories she was told by her mother.

I stumbled across a short story written by Aoko Matsuda called “Quite a Catch” in the Wasafiri literary magazine last month.

To write of Radiohead’s 2000 album Kid A is to add to the palimpsest of its criticism, at this stage a glowing, impossibly effusive set of texts.

For anyone looking to immerse themself in the literary culture of Bangladesh, Professor Razia Khan Amin’s name and presence are unavoidable.

Be it the classical enemies-to-lovers trope, the fake dating trope or the infamous, and endlessly intoxicating, love triangle, the stories below have covered it all.

Popular manga, biographies, children’s books, and latest international releases across genres are expected to become available at the store within two weeks of publication.

In this second installment, we talk about Purbo Banglar Bhasha Andolon O Totkaleen Rajneeti (The Language Movement of Bengal and Contemporary Politics), in which author and historian Badruddin Umar explains the cultural, economic, and historical context behind the Bangla language movement of 1952.

Similar to the mimicry of life by art, sometimes a book in our hands can acutely imitate the arcs of the love story we are in, ourselves—like the time a ghost lover stole a paperback Frankenstein from the neighborhood café as a last minute birthday gift for me, while our alliance reeked of haunted loneliness and painful assertions, or when one of my friends, a doctor by day and an avid reader by night, spoke about his first encounter with Harry Potter and the “cute, sweet girl across the hall.”

Ruta Sepetys’s The Fountains of Silence (Penguin Books, 2019) takes place in the 1950s, in a Spain reigned by fear and stifling laws, caught between the dichotomy of non-existent human rights on the one side, and a flourishing tourist scene and wealthy visitors wooed by the national regime on the other.

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist who covered Southeast Asia and Brazil for the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times respectively.

The event provided the bookworms of Khulna with a unique opportunity to share their books with the community.

Film director and activist Alamgir Kabir aired the first of his Shwadhin Bangla Betar Kendro dispatches on the Bangladesh Liberation War on June 15, 1971.

In any other year, the beginning of February would normally be marked by the month-long Amar Ekushey Boi Mela which unfolds across the Bangla Academy and Suhrawardy Udyan grounds.

Minar Mansur, the current director of the National Book Centre (Jatiya Grantha Kendro), was born on July 20, 1960 in the Barlia village of Chittagong.

Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine Books, 2020) discusses with great candour the complexities of human choices, of love, regret, death, and other tumultuous complications that make up life.

Half a century from where we began, throughout this 50th year of Bangladesh, Daily Star Books will revisit and analyse some of the books that played pivotal roles in documenting the Liberation War and the birth of this nation in 1971. The last issue of every month will feature an elaborate article on these books.