• The road not taken, in books

    One day many years ago, discovering my cousin’s tattered copy of a Give Yourself Goosebumps book completely changed my ideas about what books could be.

  • The fires of Partition in East Bengal

    Three years before Maloy Krishna Dhar’s death, his memoir, Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal (Penguin India, 2009), came out. Born in a sleepy village of Kamalpur in the Bhairab-Mymensingh region next to Meghna and Brahmaputra, Dhar had an illustrious career as a teacher, journalist, intelligence officer, and writer.

  • To stitch a tapestry of trauma: Material memories of the Partition of India

    A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had.

  • Earth calls the soul in ‘Inner State’

    “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

  • A book’s plea for a better internet

    “Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1999.

  • Conversations from the Daily Star Book Club

    On the Daily Star Book Club last week, we asked members how they organise and look after their book collections at home. Here is what we learned:

  • 'Once Upon An Eid': A rare glimpse into Muslim homes

    Diversity can seem jaded when it is employed for the sake of appearing “woke”.

  • Rizia Rahman, an antidote to apathy

    For lovers of short story collections, Rizia Rahman’s Char Doshoker Golpo (2011) can be great company on lazy afternoons. Rahman is undoubtedly among the finest writers of literature in Bangladesh, yet her craft goes unnoticed by many from the younger generations today.

  • Summers with Sarat Chandra

    Before my mother bought me a copy of Sarat Shahitya Samagra (2003) one fateful summer back in high school, my exposure to Bangla literature had been limited to Feluda and whatever my textbooks offered.

  • Mangoes, lychees, and childhood memories in ‘Amar Chelebela’

    For me, Amar Chelebela (1991) by Humayun Ahmed would not only be a summer read but also a comfort read, a holiday retreat, a walking tour of a Bangladesh unheard of today, and also a sneak-peak into the daily bustle of a family who redefined literature, science fiction, caricatures, humour and so much more.