The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

One of the foremost modernists of the Twentieth century, Virginia Woolf gained fame for her nonlinear, free prose style which not only inspired her peers but also earned her accolade. Yesterday was her 134th birth anniversary and to commemorate the day we have put together a list of the writer’s most iconic works.

Neeman Sobhan'sbook of short stories “Piazza Bangladesh” is a collection of eleven short stories, richly layered and delicately nuanced, that convey an amazing diversity of insights into different spaces, both actual and of the mind.

It was memory-evoking undertaking for this reviewer to go through the two books written on two maestros of ghazals who belonged to two different times. The first book is titled "Talat Mahmood: The Velvet Voice" authored by Manek Premchand and the other is "Baat Niklegi Toh Phir: The Life and Music of Jagjit Singh" by Sathya Saran. The first book has been published by Manipal University Press and the second one by HarperCollins Publishers India.

My copy of the novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif was published by Random House India from London in 2009. It's a paperback edition consisting of 364 pages, and the yellow cover shows the image of a black crow, not mangoes, being exploded. It's Hanif's debut novel and it received rave reviews from major international newspapers such as the NY Times, Washington Post and the Guardian.

Hogarth Press has commissioned a series of 'retellings' of Shakespeare plays. First to appear is Jeanette Winterson's take on The Winter's Tale.

Fractals is an encounter with a design paradigm, a certain matryoshka revelation of dolls-within-dolls.

The fluffy white puffs turned to a discordant grey

I see a black darkness

Rashna set out to meet Abedin on the Saturday after the incident at the procession, and on the way to the hospital in a rickshaw, she debated whether she was doing the right thing. It wasn't her responsibility to keep in touch with Abedin, but they had shared a perilous experience together, which seemed to make them more than strangers. They were both supposed to have been cut into pieces by Taleb and his men, but had miraculously survived. It still seemed unreal to Rashna because this sort of thing only happens in Bollywood movies.

Renowned poet Rafiq Azad is admitted to the ICU of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) in Dhaka following a stroke.

I haven't written a book review in a long time, because I didn't come across any that was out-of-the-box.

Sometimes I walk away from plights in my life

Tobias Wolff would like to think his first published novel, “Ugly Rumours”, did not exist. It does not come up on any official list of his publications...

Rashna suddenly heard one of her classmates shout, “Look that's Abedin! They're going to kill him!” Rashna turned to see a young man on the ground and recognized Abedin immediately. He was their batch-mate, an attentive and serious student who

The stories in this collection will make you see the world differently as the greatest stories always do.

Admittedly, we live in a milieu that comprises numerous sprinkled rudiments which keep crisscrossing each other in our personal-social-cultural-political existence.

Degradation of the natural environment and its impact on human lives is now visible all over the world.

Modernisation is not an easy process, but neither is its depiction (or description). Laurence Wylie's Village in the Vaucluse informs us how traditional society can go gently, yet Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart accents a more brutal face.

Time is running out fast.

The gates opened with a screech and I was out of the clinic, it's been over a month, the bright sun hit my eyes, I cringed. It was a