• Wild Flowers in a Busy Street: A Review of Anabhyaser Dine

    When I started reading Anabhyaser Dine (Unaccustomed Days), I did not know much about the author but that also meant I was free from any preconceived image about the writer and in no obligation to subscribe to a preconceived notion.

  • On Intimations of Ghalib: Translations from the Urdu

    Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797 – 1869), popularly known by his takhallus (pen name) Ghalib (conqueror), makes it difficult for writers to sum him up easily or definitively. He himself would probably have taken great and impish delight in that knowledge. In one of his ghazals he suggests (Shahid Alam

  • Truth Stranger than Fiction!

    Imagine a Japanese man in Dhaka in the first decade of the twentieth century bent on being employed in the town and ending up marrying a Bengali Brahmo woman, the daughter of a soap factory owner, who has offered him a job. Think of the woman later going to a village near Nagoya with her husband

  • It’s All Relative: Relative Truths

    However trite it may seem at first glance to call a book “It’s All Relative,” more layers are revealed on further examination of this collection of stories published by Bengal Publicationss. The title is perhaps an allusion to how stories bounce off each other, morphing into something different

  • A Bibliophile’s Review of Bargain Buys: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot

    The Queen of detective fiction (1890-1976) was in 1971 bestowed the title - Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contribution to literature by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. As with the British reigning monarch, Agatha Christie’s reign continues uninterrupted.

  • Human, All too Human!

    For anyone harboring misgivings about Rabindranath Tagore but doing so with an open mind, as well as anyone who treasures his works but is realistic enough to know that though superhuman in some ways, he was human—all too human!—this is a must read book. Certainly, I found it unputdownable.

  • The Burden of Miracle in Poonachi: or the Story of a Black Goat

    Perumal Murugan, the Tamil writer who rose to fame with self-declaration of his death as an author following protests by the Right wing against his writing, has resurrected with a forceful new novel, Poonachi.

  • Azfar Hussain’s Dorshonakkhyan: Materialist Philosophy

    In Hegelian philosophy, the dialectical relation between appearance and reality is an important relationship. Marx brought this

  • An Anchorite’s Call to Reread Tagore

    Tagore is almost a century-old fixation with the Bengali-speaking world. A continual sprightly stream of books, writings and speeches

  • Ek Kishorir Juddhajatra : A Painful Tale Told Spontaneously

    It’s the tale of a teenage girl’s reminiscence of her journey from home country to a neighbouring country to take refuge during the devastating war of liberation in the year 1971, told by herself at the age of sixty.