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

'I dedicated a lion's share of the life I've lived to poetry. I've thought of poetry as a guiding star'

A lonely soul treads on the street cultivating the sweet pain of defunct love; like a solitary artist, he rambles through the alleys of the city

Review of ‘Renegotiating Patriarchy’ (LSE Press, 2024) by Naila Kabeer

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally published in 1967) has long been heralded as a masterpiece of magical realism and a cornerstone of Latin American literature.

Starting from comfort reads to kicking-my-feet-giggling romance to stimulating memoirs, there is a little bit for everyone from every country, including the vast South Asia. Here we have accumulated a few titles to give you an overview of all the translated works published this year. 

In the psyche and schema of the average transnational Bangladeshi, rape is visible and legitimate only when it takes spectacular forms—violent, brutal, deadly.

It was the shade of the ashwath that vanquished all one’s weariness from the fiery heat of Choitro. Or else it was not possible for fatigue to be eliminated so quickly.

The basic premise is a powerful one: What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn't so bad after all, and what if the Wizard and the seemingly perfect society he oversaw were the real threats?

Research on Aviation Safety: Safety is a Mindset by Air Commodore Munim Khan Majlish is a fresh look at the concept of aviation safety challenging standard ideas about safety.

The University Press Limited (UPL) celebrated its anniversary with readers, writers and well-wishers. The exchange of greetings was held from 4 PM to 8 PM at the UPL central office, located at Green Road in Farmgate area of Dhaka, on December 13 (Friday).

The phrases “cyber safety” and “cyber lives” may seem vague and not very well understood among Bangladesh’s netizens.

I weave Hibiscuses in your hair and Along with them I softly weave the strings of my I love you’s. Your eyes are closed as you soak in my touch and Your lips are pressed thin as if imprisoning yours.

My Bangla Sings out every morning One language Many songs

For educators: My go-to text on 1971 is Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli. It’s a deeply personal and powerful memoir that I believe every student should engage with to truly feel the emotional and human cost of the war. The way she documents her experiences, especially the loss of her son, is heart-wrenching and offers a perspective that transcends history—it becomes deeply relatable and unforgettable.

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.

I fell asleep to the chatters of cicadas on a quiet summer night

In classic Bengali fiction, the kitchen is a central site for conflict and community bonding.

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

Zines are a new name for an old thing. They are the revolutionary pamphlets of the 1930s, and the underground student manifestos of the ‘50-’60s. They are a distant relative of the tattered choti mags. There are many other examples from around the world of self-published, self-distributed, and often dangerous reading material.