Book Reviews

Revisiting forgotten babyhood days with ‘Babuibela’

Every emotion associated with pregnancy and childbirth is amplified...
New online journal ‘Kitchen Sink’ promises an accessible platform for poets

About a month ago, a few friends sent me invites to follow the...
The book that I would like to read

Today I would like to talk about a book that I have been waiting to...

Tahmima Anam’s ‘The Startup Wife’ arrives at Baatighar

Tahmima Anam’s fourth and latest novel, The Startup Wife (Penguin...
Is Netflix’s ‘Ray’ worth the watch?

Netflix’s latest anthology series, Ray, is based on four short...
Who is Ayad Akhtar?

When I began reading Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown and Company,...

Colm Tóibín takes Henry James for a ride

In a detour from all the genres and topics that we review on this...
Ann Patchett’s ‘The Dutch House’: On branches of memories and pain

Even though we moved out of our grandmother’s house in Dhaka more...
A tribute to my father and his bookshelf

Last week, we marked the 10th year of my father’s death, on June...

Unpacking Bangladesh’s obsession with Bollywood

Mrittika Anan Rahman (MAR): What does it say about Bollywood that...
Feminism, activism, and literature: The legacy of Sufia Kamal

Sufia Kamal’s is a name revered in nearly every household in the...
Sensing Bangladesh through art and poetry

In their latest offering, Sensing Bangladesh – A Children’s...

‘The Moment of Lift’: Melinda Gates and the developing world’s untapped female-fuel

Female empowerment is often seen as a luxury reserved for...
Books to read if you miss travelling this summer

I know it’s hard when you want to travel, but life, owing in no...
Of the peasants’ quest for a state and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

Afsan Chowdhury’s Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Bangladesh: The Quest...

For lovers of traveling and history

Shamsul Alam’s From Love Lane to the World: Tales of Travel &...
IFIC Kali O Kolom Young Writers Award 2020 winners announced

Sponsored by IFIC Bank, this year’s Kali O Kolom Torun Kabi O...
Soumitra Chatterjee: The one man behind the many

It is impossible to ascribe any one particular character to...

Forgiveness, growth, and second chances in Sarah Hogle’s ‘Twice Shy’

Reading Sarah Hogle’s Twice Shy (GP Putnam’s Sons, 2021) is like...
My learning from Anne Frank as she turns 92

Not all books fulfil the purpose of exploring metaphors or offering...
Tahmima Anam launches and discusses ‘The Startup Wife’ at Hay Festival

On June 3, 2021, Bangladeshi-born British writer Tahmima Anam...

A truly ‘Invincible’ comic book series

While DC and Marvel, the two big dogs of the comic book industry,...
Relationships lost and found in debut novel ‘Punyaha’.

In the middle of nowhere, among the wide expanse of paddy fields...
A handbook for navigating the social media age in your profession

While the world might seem like a place only made for extroverts,...

A G Stock's Memoirs of Dacca University

“The book is a memoir, not a history, and makes no claim to a historian's detachment or research.” With this statement, A G Stock
They Also Were Involved

The subtitle of the book proposes it all: fourteen writers reminisce about their own, or their dear ones' experiences immediately prior to, or during, or at the end of the Liberation War of Bangladesh.
Verses on love and agony: Mashuk Chowdhury's Swarger Replica

Two years earlier I had reviewed one of Mashuk Chowdhury's poetry collections Nodir Nam Dusshomoy for The Daily Star Book Review
Going Beyond Gossip and Name-Dropping?

“Biographies do walk the 'precarious high wire between fiction and non-fiction” (Claire Battershill in “No One Wants Biography”).
Making Revolution Strange/r: Viktor Shklovsky and the Bolsheviks

1978. When Serena Vitale, an Italian writer and translator, managed her third meeting with Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), the
ALL WORK AND SOME PLAY AT RADA

Rada was a lot of hard work interspersed with a good deal of pressure releasers. Talk about the right doses of work and play—RADA
Revisiting Banaphool's Stories

No life can simply be subsumed under a single category- nor is it possible to come up with a single term to define life's fluxes or
Of Jean Paul Sartre and Imposture

In October 1964, Jean Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, a French philosopher and novelist, was declared winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for that year.
Two Poems by Maruful Islam

The last traces of water evaporate from the beak of the wind
Through Time and Tide

Boats: A Treasure of Bangladesh acts as a paean to the ancient, yet now sadly dying craft of naval carpentry in Bangladesh. Its roots in the region go back far enough for Ibn Battuta...