NEWS REPORT / The Booker 2025 longlist announced: A global showcase of the power of fiction

The 2025 Booker Prize longlist was revealed on Tuesday, July 29, showcasing a diverse ensemble of literary brilliance, with novels that spanned continents, genres, and narrative styles

BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Tracing an uprising in strokes

Graffiti has long played a powerful role in revolutions around the world. From the walls of Paris in 1968 to the slogans of the Arab Spring, street art has served as one of the most immediate and accessible forms of resistance.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Between protest and power: Shahriar’s portrait of a nation in flux

Literary experts often caution against writing a novel immediately after a major political upheaval, arguing that personal involvement may cloud objectivity.

Kolkata, unplugged

Review of Mitali Chakravarty’s ‘From Calcutta to Kolkata: A City of Dreams: Poems’ (Hawakal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 2025)

‘She and Her Cat’ and the quiet power of presence

The cats don't always understand the human specifics, but they recognise sadness. They notice routines. And most of all, they stay

Wings of ash

and for every grave / a firefly burns / and for every grave / Dhaka never learns

Scorching silence

Scorching in a way the April sun never was. / Scorching in a way a fever never feels. / It wasn't just grief

‘Jodi Lokkho Thake Otut’: Self-help done right

Review of ‘Jodi Lokkho Thake Otut: Shafolyer Khola Koushol’ (Anyaprokash, 2025) by Asif Iqbal

EWU hosts ‘7th Nahreen Khan Memorial Lecture’ with Dr Niaz Zaman

She discussed the increasing recognition of translated literature, as evidenced by prestigious awards such as the International Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize

From the margins, a voice remembered

Review of ‘The Last Bench’ (Ekadā, 2025) by Adhir Biswas

Give back the forests, take away this city

As Fulbanu waited for Syed Ali, she thought about her only son, Suruj. She remembered that Suruj was the first man among five neighbouring villages to acquire his bachelor's degree

Reviews

Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Painted in friendship, framed by grief

“Art is empathy,” Fredrik Backman writes. So is friendship—the kind that stays with you long after the summer ends.The kind you find when you’re 14 and everything is breaking and beginning at once. The kind of friendship that becomes a map back to yourself, years later, when you’re lost in grief, guilt, or even just the quiet ache of growing up. Fredrik Backman’s My Friends is a love letter to those friendships.

BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Imagining Africa in Bengali fiction and verse

Mowtushi Mahruba’s Africa in the Bengali Imagination: from Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-73 is a distinctive and pioneering work on the way the continent led to creative writing in English as well as Bengali over the decades

BOOK REVIEW: POETRY / When silence speaks louder than words

'On the Other Side of Silence' is a thoughtful volume of poetry, not just because it summarises every existential crisis that visits contemporary life but also because it engages, unlike a postmodern cynic, with the issues that plague the world

⁠⁠Recommendations

⁠⁠Recommendations

WHAT WE'RE READING THIS WEEK / Freedom, Politics, and Humanity: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin

A stunning meditation on some of the concepts that haunt our present moment—humanity and moralism, Zionism today, democracy and imperialism and perhaps most significantly, the question that lies at the very heart of the human condition: what does it mean

THE SHELF / Books for different types of readers on Eid

Eid-ul-Azha is right around the corner, which entails delicious meals, family gatherings, and a little extra downtime between all the Qurbani preparation and feasting.

THE SHELF / 5 books my 5-year-old can’t get enough of

In a world where smart TVs, touchscreen tablets, and mobiles are always within reach, I feel grateful that my daughter, who is almost five and a half, often brings me books and asks me to read them to her for a quick, fun storytime

⁠⁠Features

⁠⁠Features

INTERVIEW / An evening at Bengal Parampara Sangeetalay and Dhaka Sessions

In one of their most recent episodes, Dhaka Sessions featured three young artists from Bengal Parampara Sangeetalay to perform in the intimate and literary, lush space of Bookworm Bangladesh

ESSAY / Panic, puke and Palahniuk

Now, two decades later, the question lingers: Did "Guts" really cause waves of fainting spells, or did the legend grow legs of its own?

REFLECTION / Ammu reads

Throughout my school years, Ammu would assign a different writer for me to read during each vacation

Philosophical fraternity of Rabindranath Tagore and Anwar Ibrahim

In a lecture, Rabindranath proclaimed, “I hope that some dreamer will spring from among you and preach a message of love and therewith, overcoming all differences..."

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’: Reverberating despair and dread through a theatrical production

All Quiet on the Western Front (Little, Brown and Company, 1929), a semi-autobiographical novel authored by a German World War I veteran, Erich Maria Remarque, is one of the greatest anti-war works of literature—one that was published nearly a century back and still holds relevance today

The poet who declared birth was his eternal sin

Remembering the stateless poet Daud Haider

A tribute to the written word

'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies'

⁠⁠Fiction

⁠⁠Fiction

Fiction / The feed and the filter

Mira presses her thumb on the cracked power button of her phone.

Fiction / Box office nation

When Mr. Vik Roman looked at the time with flinching eyes, it was around 3:30 am.

KHERO KHATA / Under the olive tree

Then you will vanish—becoming Amma, Chachi, Mami. No one will remember your name.

In defense of disorder

At a gathering in the unfinished community hall, Saleha raises a question: "They gave us walls. But what do we want to grow inside them?"

Polychrome

I made my first kite out of white paper scraps; on my 16th birthday, it came to me that they needed a pop of color.

Metalheart

I know my engine is dying. I know that, by the time the next Eid rolls around, the busy little humans will have taken me apart to create something new.

A sacrifice

When he was handing over the money to Naimuddin, their father, Kalam silently cried, holding Dholi’s neck in the yard.

⁠⁠Poetry

⁠⁠Poetry

Poetry / The lost rhythm

Summer has imprinted crow’s feet under my eyes, .Yet I have aged only a quarter. .That’s was when .I dunked myself—starting with the crown of my head—into the ocean where The southern sun resides, to imprint upon my face its sheen, .rhythm of miracles, and to honour it wi

Poetry / Maturing

Always the same whining about the distances, always the same

Poetry / Ashen bloom

The air tasted of burnt sugar and broken vows–sweetness clinging to the char. It began with a whisper, then the slow, inevitable searing of what we believed was solid ground.

The Booker 2025 longlist announced: A global showcase of the power of fiction

The 2025 Booker Prize longlist was revealed on Tuesday, July 29, showcasing a diverse ensemble of literary brilliance, with novels that spanned continents, genres, and narrative styles

18h ago

Between protest and power: Shahriar’s portrait of a nation in flux

Literary experts often caution against writing a novel immediately after a major political upheaval, arguing that personal involvement may cloud objectivity.

1d ago

Tracing an uprising in strokes

Graffiti has long played a powerful role in revolutions around the world. From the walls of Paris in 1968 to the slogans of the Arab Spring, street art has served as one of the most immediate and accessible forms of resistance.

1d ago

‘Jodi Lokkho Thake Otut’: Self-help done right

Review of ‘Jodi Lokkho Thake Otut: Shafolyer Khola Koushol’ (Anyaprokash, 2025) by Asif Iqbal

4d ago

The lost rhythm

Summer has imprinted crow’s feet under my eyes, .Yet I have aged only a quarter. .That’s was when .I dunked myself—starting with the crown of my head—into the ocean where The southern sun resides, to imprint upon my face its sheen, .rhythm of miracles, and to honour it wi

6d ago

Maturing

Always the same whining about the distances, always the same

6d ago

Ashen bloom

The air tasted of burnt sugar and broken vows–sweetness clinging to the char. It began with a whisper, then the slow, inevitable searing of what we believed was solid ground.

6d ago

The feed and the filter

Mira presses her thumb on the cracked power button of her phone.

6d ago

‘She and Her Cat’ and the quiet power of presence

The cats don't always understand the human specifics, but they recognise sadness. They notice routines. And most of all, they stay

1w ago

Kolkata, unplugged

Review of Mitali Chakravarty’s ‘From Calcutta to Kolkata: A City of Dreams: Poems’ (Hawakal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 2025)

1w ago