• Four new books to read this March

    In July of 2013, Patricia Lockwood wrote the decade’s most immediate and pressing poem, “Rape Joke”. Already by then Lockwood had amassed prizes and praises enough to fill a few cabinets.

  • The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

    Here is a door stopper for the lingering period of hibernation. All 522 pages provide ample literary support for long-term homebound inmates.

  • Is science fiction really not a woman’s genre?

    Last week, I decided to pen a tribute to my favourite authors of science fiction, a love letter, really, that has long been in the pipeline.

  • Five novels with strong women protagonists

    Hellfire is at once a book about patriarchy and the toxic strand of matriarchy that supports it. Through the lives of sisters Lovely and Beauty, both kept from socialisation and even attending school deep into middle age, the novel captures near perfectly the convoluted blueprint of life for South Asian women.

  • The case of the missing girl: Where are we in Bangla children’s literature?

    It wasn’t until my 20s that I realised I had read less than 10 Bengali women authors in my childhood and adolescence.

  • Once More Into the Past: Essays, Personal, Public, and Literary

    “How does Tagore intoxicate a growing young man . . . .? How has Dhaka transitioned through the Partition of Bengal and the birth of the University of Dhaka? . . . . how does one remember-- with nuance, with style-- icons of history and culture . . . .?”

  • What does it take to build a business empire?

    Binod K Chaudhary, the chairman of the CG Corp Global conglomerate group, is Nepal’s first billionaire and possibly the most successful industrialist in his nation.

  • Conservation through literature

    The River Tales (2021) is a series of graphic novels for children, commissioned by Asia Foundation’s ‘Let’s Read Asia’ digital library project and produced by HerStory Foundation in an effort to raise awareness about Bangladesh’s heritage and culture. Sarah Anjum Bari, editor of Star Books, speaks to Katerina Don, curator at HerStory Foundation, writer Anita Amreen, and artist Sayeef Mahmud about their processes of research, writing, and graphic designing for the series.

  • Translation with a Midas touch

    Abdus Selim, a noted Bangladeshi translator, playwright, essayist and educationist, has, of late, come up with a collection of five plays in Bangla translation titled Panch Manchanubad (Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2021).

  • Night has brought him something worse: 2021’s first must-read

    “The thing was that everyone knew Julita’s parents hadn’t died in any accident: Julita’s folks had disappeared. They were disappeared. They’d been disappeared”.