Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

Nirupama Subramaniam meets writer and historian Ramachandra Guha on the sunlit balcony of the authors lounge at the Bangla Academy during the Dhaka Lit Fest. Despite the weight of being a public intellectual and academic, there is a lightness about his presence. The author of India before Gandhi (Penguin; 2013) and Patriots and Partisans (Penguin; 2012) speaks at a fast pace, stabbing the air to make a point, as though he feels each word deeply. It is almost like listening to a story.

War is a sky shattering fierce roar of clouds, quick footsteps

Rumi glorified wisdom and placed it on top of power and pomp. Rumi's love for wisdom with dignity, rather than for wealth......

This anti-slavery novel .... is believed to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War.

Writers Tom Watson and Martin Hickman couldn't have selected a better title than Dial M for Murdoch, borrowing from Alfred Hitchcock,

“Do you believe in love? That love exists? Between a man and a woman?”

Every Bohemian fairytale I have read starts off with a man who has too many kids and too little money; money which he impulse buys a rope with...

We all have gone through that horrible phase of curling up in our beds and crying over the deaths of our favourite fictional characters...

Franz Kafka is an icon of 20th century literature. The Metamorphosis, a novella written in 1912, is considered as his seminal work of fiction.

As had been happening to him a lot lately, especially during a long wait, he dozed off. It occurred to him that he could not keep his...

The past few decades have seen remarkable changes people's romantic lives. Even in Bangladesh, where families fixing matches was the social norm for decades...

IN 1975, when Chinua Achebe accused Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and harshly deprecated the image of Africa as portrayed in...

Shabdaghar, a monthly magazine of culture and literature centers on the glorious treasures of Bangla art, culture and literature.

So many writers in the field of literature (particularly poetry) from any country have associated (or tried to) nature with human emotion

They are walking altogether - dragging their feet

This is an excerpt of Nesar Nadim's début novel "Demons". The book is available in the bookstores and at rokomari.com

Humayun Ahmed is the most celebrated writer of contemporary time and one of the best story tellers in the history of Bangla literature.

A SECRET OF A WAR BABY, written by Shahazada Basunia is a novel which mainly focuses on the war time rape victims who made their supreme sacrifices for the sake of achieving independence.

Anwarul Kabir's latest compilation of fifty two micro-fictions Mind Reader got published in Ekushey Boi Mela of 2015.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the top-ranking English writers of the eighteenth century. He is widely known as a satirist.