The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Beloved Rongomala', translated from the Bangla novel, 'Shokhi Rongomala' (Bengal Publications, 2015), by Shabnam Nadiya, will now be published by India’s Eka imprint of Westland Publications. The novel tells the story of Queen Phuleswari, a child bride, and of Rongomala, a woman of legend—a low caste mistress to the king who protested the limits to which her rights were confined by the class and caste prejudices of 18th century southern Bengal.

In Metaphor, David Punter reads Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) which draws upon Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1921) for its title, arguing that the centre is “responsible for the very social, political and cultural problems now being encountered in Africa, and perhaps globally” (117).

A Brief History of Silence (by Manu Dash) was an enjoyable read on my silent rooftop spanning a silent week. But as I sat on the silent table for a review, I sat amazed and brooding. The poet must have had a frightful toil, and it’s not easy to write a poem on his silence by shifting, correcting, combining, constructing, expurgating, expunging and tasting words, phrases, images as well as the empty spaces between them to pen his dreams and intellect. And I wonder what is left for me to write more on it!

In a brief but insightful episode of Star Book Talk last week, Bangladeshi-Australian chef Kishwar Chowdhury, runner up of MasterChef Australia 2021, revealed her fascination with cookbooks and books related to food as an artform. Here we find out more about the three books Kishwar highlighted as personal favourites—even, at one point, pulling out one of them from her shelves!

On June 30, a virtual ceremony for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize was held, and for the first time in its history a Sri Lankan writer was announced as the overall winner.

The second volume of Dhaka University: The Convocation Speeches, 1948-1970 (Dhaka University Publications, 1989), assembled assiduously by Emeritus Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, is an important publication like the first one for anyone trying to understand Dhaka University’s extraordinary role in the genesis and identity formation of Bangladesh.

In this addition to this series, following up on the previous installment’s focus on nonfiction narratives of Birangonas’s lives and experiences, we recall Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s '1971' (2015) and Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Talaash' (2004), two books that can be considered as significant exceptions to the trend mentioned above, and also as examples of the politics of representation, objectification of women, and the desensitisation of lived experiences of trauma.

Before I knew it, I developed a personal relationship with the book. I was glued from beginning till end. I read slowly. Sometimes I read the same section twice. I could not focus on anything else till I finished. The experience was psychedelic: an expansion of the mind (imagination). In the end, the second omen worked. I was out of depression. Ricardo was right: “a good book (or film) can pull you out of depression”. 

This year’s Booker Prize longlist, the most prestigious literary award for fiction published in the UK, was released yesterday, with well-loved names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Patricia Lockwood, and Richard Powers making the cut alongside the critically acclaimed Anuk Arudpragasam, Sunjeev Sahota, Damon Galgut, and others. 

The past one year has inclined our lives towards a virtual medium as we work from home and attend classes online. Subsequently, binge-watching shows and films has become the premier mode of relaxing for many. For readers who cannot take out the time to sit with a book, their adaptations—particularly of young adult stories—can be a welcome solution.    

Karina’s experiences are conveyed with compassion, emphasising the real issues of gender inequality in South Asian communities. The fact that parents continue to force their dreams on children instead of letting them pursue their own speaks volumes about the family dynamics existing in our households. Karina is seen to experiment with various ways of coping with anxiety instead of seeking professional help. Her experiences represent the glaring lack of mental health care in our community, even beyond national borders. That being said, the techniques Karina employs could be a helpful resource for readers suffering from similar issues. 

It was a hot August afternoon when I stood on the tarmac at the St Louis airport staring at the tiny 7-seater that looked like a toy plane. What? I thought. I would have to get on that? Was this some kind of a joke? Three other passengers were also waiting, but they seemed strangely unperturbed.

Where do you stand on this matter of pulling down statues, a hot topic during the ongoing Black and Indigenous Lives Matter campaigns? Do you favour putting up statues at all? Who, if anyone, would you put one up to?

At every step of her journey in the MasterChef kitchen—from her fried sardines with beetroot and blood orange to a date-nestled, ice cream infused paan and panta bhaat with aloo bhorta—Kishwar Chowdhury has talked about writing a cookbook for Bangladeshi recipes as her ultimate dream. In this episode of Star Book Talk, Daily Star Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari talks about food, books, and cookbooks with Kishwar Chowdhury.

To me, he was a weaver of stories from lands and cultures, all within Bangladesh, that I would never have heard of otherwise. Growing up abroad amidst mixed cultures and languages, Humayun Ahmed kept Bangladesh within me and in thousands of others like me.

The DS Books staff are thrilled about the return of the "Best Reads" series. Read on as we share our thoughts about the books, published in 2021, which made us escape into the most diverse of worlds (ones where the pandemic is a distant memory, if even that). While this list isnt exhaustive—it’s simply the books that have most stayed with us this year so far—it is complete with gut wrenching tales of heartbreak and wonderful stories of triumph, which transport the reader to the outside without requiring them to step outside our humble abodes.

I have had the opportunity of living for some time in Conrad’s fictional places, namely Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo) and Malaysia’s eastern province Sarawak’s adjoining country in Borneo Island, Brunei Darussalam.

To love a country as if you’ve lost one  Is to feel the freezing sun on your body Form icicles on your cheeks as you train your feet To dance hopscotch on rough asphalt;

A book may look like a house or a coffin But a maker of books cannot be contained between ordinary covers. Between the Muses’ minions, stodgy academics, Smarmy marketing men and discount-hungry retailers He waves a baton to conduct a chorus That threatens to collapse any moment into cacophony, Yet keeps the show going,

Rachel Clarke reminds us of the intensity of the ongoing tragedy in her autobiographical Breathtaking (Little, Brown, 2021), told from the extraordinary perspective of a palliative care doctor.