It sounds flippant to put it that way but, the Aeneid, at its core, really is a continuation fic—picking up where Homer’s Trojan War ended and following Aeneas, a minor character in the canon, as he stumbles through an entirely new narrative along with original characters and incredibly expanded lore.

But it goes without saying that Rabindranath, as the most famous member of the Tagore family and one of the cornerstones of Bengali culture, is thoroughly intertwined with the most significant day of the Bengali calendar. His thoughts on PohelaBaishakh are complex and evolved over the years, alongside his own development as an artist and the changing societal circumstances, as can be seen through his three essays on this day.

Romance has never existed apart from inequality. The genre depends on distance—on obstacles that make love feel hard-won.

Existentialism is a philosophical theory and a literary perspective. Its central proposition is that the world has no a priori meaning or purpose.

In classical studies of sensory experiences, philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggest that bodily sensations constitute our lived reality.

Just as Bengali women played an important role in the Liberation War, they also played a fearless role in the movement for the Bangla language before it, participating alongside men as fellow warriors.

In addition to today’s transnational corporations and the global explosion of their advertisements, the works of William Shakespeare and Karl Marx keep teaching us a great deal about the relationship between money and language.

For years, speculative dystopian fiction has trained readers to expect the worst: scorched planets, collapsing governments, ruthless technologies, and futures where survival is the only victory left. Solarpunk pushes back against that narrative. Instead of asking how the world ends, it asks a far more radical question: what if we fix it? What if cities worked with nature instead of against it? What if technology served communities, not corporations? And what if hope wasn’t naive, but necessary?

It is undoubted that George Orwell is one of the most important political writers of the 20th century. Labelling him a political writer reflects how deeply his life and works were influenced by the events he lived through.

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.

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 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.

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.

My readings of the two books—the subject of this write-up—happened to be on two momentous occasions, set two decades apart in utterly contrasting ways.

Heathcliff portrays a very unique strain of masculinity. It is not one that comes from being a man in a patriarchal society, nor from one being amongst majority women.

Before he was “Leonard Cohen—the celebrated singer”, he was “Cohen, the poet”.

In the mist-covered hills of Ooty and the famine-ravaged villages of Bengal, they speak of ghosts. They whisper of a Zamindar’s phantom haunting a grand manor and a shape-shifting shakchunni preying on a crumbling estate.

Farhad Mazhar has long stood at the unpredictable intersection of poetry, politics, and philosophy.

Some poets arrive like rain on parched soil—needing no defense, only recognition. Al Mahmud (1936–2019) was one of them. And yet, in the usual crookedness of history, we have found ourselves having to defend what should already have been canonised. There was a time—not long ago—when his name uns