I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.

As someone who is interested in Muslim novels—by which I mean novels written by Muslims about Muslims—I always feel a scholarly tug towards Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (Scribner, 1995) when speaking of the at times uneasy but mostly comfortable marriage between music and literature.

Death dwells between is and was, Riding the final particle of a fading breath.

It is odd that nowadays One seldom hears the words

The door didn’t fully click shut. That was an ordinary affair in the house because the door locked to prevent escape. But, by chance or sheer good luck, it didn’t fully lock this time. The click was off. Someone hadn’t done their job correctly. Bloody hell, no one does their jobs correctly in this godforsaken country.

It’s a truism to say that modern life is complicated, but even a couple of decades ago, it would have been hard to predict the things we are dealing with today.

In this digital age, we are processing a large amount of information everyday and it’s important to learn media literacy in order to see the bigger picture.

You land in London with £210 in your pocket. It is the year 2009. You are able to pay the first month’s rent for the room, but not the deposit. You have to share it with an acquaintance from Dhaka. He arrived a week prior.

Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.

As time passed by and as the poet made an introspection in seclusion, he dug up such verses which to the reader might feel like a revelation of truth.

Rarely does a book arrive, a debut no less, that feels as inventive and accomplished as Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Her novel is built on the crossroads of interpretation and ownership, of the power of language and of those privileged enough to reclaim it.

Bibhuti Babu’s pen tenderly reveals the nudity of apparently disturbing feelings and emotions that we are so ashamed and afraid to accept and express.

Dickens, a literary luminary of his era, exposes the vicious cycle where hunger and desperation divide society, laying bare the inequities perpetuated by an exploitative system.

In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.

I was a little anxious. It was only the second day of my life at the University of Cambridge, and I was already bombarded with instructions on how to dine.

that single spot, shunyo, a hole that is filled to its circumference, I drive and the sun is bigger than I’ve ever seen and orange, look directly into it or, i had to write a poem to go along with the first

His face was growing warmer, it seemed as though the intangible entity that was stinging his closed eyes was growing stronger.

The Joke quickly became one of the many works of literature to be banned after the Soviet invasion, and Kundera was blacklisted.

While novelists such as Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Sanjeeb Chandra Chattopadhyay adopted an ambiguous position on caste discourse in their writing, Mahasweta Devi's fiction explicitly delineates the Dalits and adivasis as political, social, and psychological beings embroiled in multiple levels of oppression.

The creators of Small World City believe that Dhaka’s literary community deserves better recognition and representation, both domestically and globally.