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.
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.
From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),
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.
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.
Everett’s breezy, fast-moving retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about putting in some due respect.
Speaking of Gilmore Girls, the first addition to our list is a hearty romantic novel by Laurie Gilmore. This book is a written rendition of Stars Hollow itself—starting from the quirky characters to its eternally golden atmosphere.
Happy Hour greeted me like a warm hug. This is definitely one of the sweetest books I’ve read this year, and possibly one of the sweetest books I will ever read.
There is something to be said about the innate process of otherising a person with disability, and pushing them out of the group of the ‘norm’ and into the group of the ‘exception’.
Jhumpa Lahiri has always been the rare author whose prowess in the art of the short-story far surpassed her novelistic talents.
An interesting concern in contemporary children’s literature criticism is the discussion of power. Do the fictive children in children’s books, conceived and delivered by the adult author, have the ability to exercise their will and possess a voice?
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) was exceptional in many different ways. Born on December 9, 1880, in a sleepy village in Rangpur, undivided Bengal, she died on the same day, 52 years later,
“They should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit for nothing.”
On a chilly winter morning of November 2010, I came across a story that would stamp my childhood permanently. It was the winter vacation and the school finals were just over. While playing board games at one of my friend’s, I found quite a picturesque book filled with illustrations and art. It was titled, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Addison Square is one of those hidden enclaves where well-heeled Londoners tuck themselves away to create bubbles of “civilised life” from which they can exclude the riffraff surrounding them in the mega-city they call home.
When a dear friend recommended The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, it took me one page to grow up.
Bangladeshi literature in English has had a considerably late start compared to its South Asian counterparts in India and Pakistan. A few exceptions aside, a consistency came to be seen only by the early 2010s.
Award winning Irish writer Claire Keegan is a master of short fiction. Her previous novel, Small Things Like
Mahmudul Haque was a writer who championed the modern and independent stream of Bangla literature.
