Review of Mitali Chakravarty’s ‘From Calcutta to Kolkata: A City of Dreams: Poems’ (Hawakal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 2025)
“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.
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
Shahid Alam and I go back a long way, though we had both half-forgotten it until recently. He was two years senior to me at St. Gregory’s High School.
Aptly named Ateet Theke Adhuna: Bangladesher Naari Lekhok, this collection is unlike a conventional anthology. Starting with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the list of writers includes an impressive 66 great authors.
When I picked up Baitullah Quaderee’s 'Bangladesher Shater Dashaker Kabita', it wasn’t particularly out of scholarly curiosity. The book is, by design, a doctoral thesis—its structure conventional, its chapters arranged by academic demand—but what caught my interest was not the format, nor even the topic. It was the author himself.
In Lakshmi’s Secret Diary, Ari Gautier crafts a dazzling, multi-layered narrative that is as whimsical as it is profound.
These stories subtly highlight how even within patriarchal structures, men, too, are shaped, sometimes twisted by the systems they benefit from.
Storytelling is not easy, especially when a few words portray a character with depth and just enough strokes to etch the social milieu for certain classes and creeds and the outcomes of political ideologies in post-independent Bangladesh.
Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977).
From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),
Review of ‘Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood’ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1986) by Anthony Mascarenhas
Review of ‘Renegotiating Patriarchy’ (LSE Press, 2024) by Naila Kabeer
Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.
Proverbs, short and profound, often sum up wisdom passed down through generations. Bangla, one of the world’s most spoken languages, is rich with such gems. One such saying in the language—”manush ki bolbe?”—is central to Intimacies of Violence, a debut book by Dr Nadine Shaanta Murshid, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.
Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.
The city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, was once the breeding hotspot of the 20th century’s greatest writers, scientists, scholars, and activists.
Folk Melody of Bangladesh: An Anthology of Bangladesh Folk Music in Standard Notation is a music anthology that compiles 204 carefully chosen folk songs of Bangladesh that date from the 16th century.
In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime.
