Bot Book Reviews

Bot Book Reviews

ESSAY / Between tradition and taboo: The arranged marriage trope in Bangla dark romance literature

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not endorse or condone any form of abuse or exploitation.

4m ago

EVENT REPORT / Celebrating diversity and language at “Bhasha Utshob 2025”

Gulshan Society held a two-day language festival at the Gulshan Lake Park, curated by Sadaf Saaz and Jatrik. The event took place over the weekend of 21-22 February that saw discussion panels, original musical performances, and poetry recitations, surrounded by an array of book stalls and food courts.

4m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Rediscovering Reading: How ‘Fragments of Riversong’ helped me heal

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

5m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Murakami and the limits of an artist’s imagination

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

5m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Shards of clarity

Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.

5m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Accounts of a joyless life

Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.

5m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Through folklore and fantasy: An ode to Bangla mythological characters

The book invites you to revel in the world of legends, to dream as you once did as a child.

6m ago

EVENT REPORT / ‘Catfish and Avatars’: Discussions on cyber lives and cyber safety

The phrases “cyber safety” and “cyber lives” may seem vague and not very well understood among Bangladesh’s netizens.

6m ago

Life and literature in footnotes

“Kichudin jabot Dhakay cholchhe prochur gorom, abar eki shathe shaolar gondho chorano brishti hochhe.” The incessant heat and rainfall, the month of May, the lull of Eid holidays and the call of books, films, and music are just some of the elements that make Apurba Jahangir’s Footnotes (Subarna, 2021) a fitting read for this time of the year.

4y ago

Project Shohay: Book auction to support sex workers

Project Shohay, a fundraising campaign jointly organised by Litmosphere and the youth-led sexual awareness organisation Bodol, launched on Tuesday, May 18, with the aim of creating employment opportunities for women in “floating” sex work.

4y ago

Top reads to better understand the horrors of Palestine

With settler colonialism and apartheid taking place in Palestine—with at least 227 Palestinians, 64 of them children, having been killed over the last 11 days

4y ago

Kelly Link’s ‘The Summer People’ and an escape from writer’s block

On the tail end of “The Lottery” in the summer of 1948, Shirley Jackson finished writing in one morning’s worth of work her underappreciated short story, “The Summer People”.

4y ago

An anarchist retelling of Tintin

The globetrotting hero-reporter, he of the blonde quiff and the plus four trousers, had many an adventure throughout a 46-year-long run under

4y ago

‘Shadow and Bone’: Fantasy adaptation done right

With the demise of Game of Thrones, Netflix seems best poised to offer a replacement—with The Witcher gearing for a second season and now

4y ago

At Night All Blood is Black: All that war leaves behind

At Night All Blood Is Black (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020; transl. Anna Moschovakis), shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, is a

4y ago

An ode to cricket, taken with a pinch of salt

The Commonwealth of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair with the Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known to Humankind (HarperCollins India, 2020) is Ramachandra Guha’s latest book on cricket. It is his ode to a game his mother introduced him to at the age of four, and his father told him stories of.

4y ago

Between the two partitions of Bengal

In my book, Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal: Between Memories and History (Peter Lang, NYC, 2021), I focus on the era of pre-Partition Bengal, trekking through old family recollections, oral anecdotes, memoirs, and other available books and documents on pre-independence India, and blend them with the larger history of British Bengal.

4y ago

Creating an appetite for Bangladeshi fiction

A good story is hard to find. Niaz Zaman, the editor of The Demoness: The Best Bangladeshi Short Stories, 1971-2021 (Aleph Book Company, 2021), has found 27 “best” short stories to create an appetite for Bangladeshi fiction.

4y ago