CREATIVE NONFICTION / Our Eids and Puja in Azimpur
30 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
In 1970s Azimpur, the two Eids and Durga Puja were the punctuation marks of our year—days when stairwells, verandas, and a single playground turned many flats into one home.
CREATIVE NONFICTION / The flavours of Eid and the memory of home
30 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
The Shelf / Chand raat in Dhaka through the eyes of literary characters
27 May 2026, 23:33 PM
The Shelf
THE SHELF / The knife is always ready 5 books for the season of sacrifice
27 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
BOOK REVIEW: POETRY / Pias Majid: The poet of the moonlight conference
27 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
Nazrul cannot be contained within a singular frame
25 May 2026, 09:00 AM
Culture
Essay / Anti-colonial resistance in Kazi Nazrul Islam’s essays
23 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Essay
Essay / Raja Rammohun Roy: An architect of Asian cosmopolitan modernity
23 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Essay
Alt-lit / What you can’t remember will definitely hurt you: Antimemes and qntm’s Antimemetics SCP saga
21 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Features
Interview / Writing what silence carries: Mohua Chinappa on memory, pain, and inheritance
Thorns in My Quilt (Rupa Publications India, 2024) unfolds through address rather than disclosure. Written as a series of letters to her father, Mohua Chinappa’s memoir traces memory not as a sequence of events, but as an emotional inheritance shaped by silence, expectation, and the subtle negotiations that govern family life.
News Report / From the ashes: Gaza’s first grassroots library rises amid genocide
12 April 2026, 21:43 PM
Two Palestinian writers, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim Massri, have been working since late 2025 to build a library in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. The Phoenix Library is located in the heart of Gaza City and, per a post from the library’s Twitter/X account, is fast approaching its official opening date despite the Gaza Strip and all of occupied Palestine still being subject to Israeli apartheid violence.
NEWS REPORT / Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me secures 2026 NBCC Award, continues global recognition
28 March 2026, 17:07 PM
Celebrated author and activist Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin, 2025) continues to solidify its place in the zeitgeist and its cultural impact well into 2026, with its recent win at this year’s US National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in the Autobiography category.
Atopor Shabdayan becomes Bangladesh partner of global poetry platform Lyrikline
22 March 2026, 10:37 AM
Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew
28 March 2026, 03:42 AM
Creative non-fiction
Children of 1972–73 came of age alongside Bangladesh itself. In Azimpur’s close‑knit colony, a telephone became a neighbourhood lifeline, television was a shared ritual, and the Buriganga was our afternoon escape.
FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali
20 March 2026, 20:20 PM
Essay / The Cosmere is getting adapted: Here is where to start reading
14 March 2026, 21:02 PM
CREATIVE NONFICTION / Sweetened ice and other lessons in kindness
14 March 2026, 01:59 AM
Essay / A meaningless world: Sartre, Camus, Waliullah, and Badal Sircar
14 March 2026, 01:48 AM
CREATIVE NONFICTION / The devil wears Maria B
7 March 2026, 02:13 AM
The shelf / 6 Books to contextualise the present conflict in the Gulf
1 March 2026, 21:07 PM
ESSAY / Romance, radical hope, and the modern happily ever after
27 February 2026, 00:05 AM
Books to read about the oppression of women in Iran
To understand the socio-political context and the country’s present state of affairs—one which gave birth to such daring dissenters—it is important to read books and stories which unveil the experience of individuals chained by Iran’s despots.
24 September 2022, 11:58 AM
‘Nil Chhaya’ reconjures ghosts of Bengal’s Indigo Revolution
‘Nil Chhaya' connects the Indigo Revolt to the oppressions faced by present day garment factory workers in Bangladesh.
24 September 2022, 09:03 AM
Welcome Farewell
Grieve no more–
As for Notan
The poet has amassed much grief.
Let me plant a tree of fog
23 September 2022, 18:00 PM
That’s How Poetry Is
(Translated by Md Mehedi Hasan)
My mother often tells me—
What would these poems
bring?
23 September 2022, 18:00 PM
“Winter Night Ghost Stories”: Star Literature Year-End Contest
Winter nights are surely the best time for ghost stories or tales of spirits returning from the dead. This year, The Daily Star is preparing for some chilling winter night haunting.
23 September 2022, 18:00 PM
Homecoming: a short story by Syed Shamsul Haq
My plane landed in Dhaka at 2:30. By the time, I went through customs, it was 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I became restless. How long would it take to go home? No one lived there now. My house stood alone, empty. I left it one month and thirty days ago. I locked the door before I left.
23 September 2022, 18:00 PM
Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall trilogy, no more
Hilary Mantel, British author of the Tudor series of books known as the Wolf Hall trilogy, passed away peacefully on Thursday, September 22, Reuters reports. The twice Booker Prize-winning author was 70.
23 September 2022, 17:01 PM
Connecting generations through stories
Some of my most fervent memories from my chaotically loving childhood is of my Nanuji gathering all of us cousins, big bowl of rice and curry in hand ready to be prepped into balls and stuffed into our ravenous mouths, while reading Sukumar Ray’s 'Hajabarala' and 'Abol Tabol'.
23 September 2022, 09:00 AM
Race and unease in Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Last White Man’
In The Last White Man, Hamid uses an anodyne, clinical voice to set an atmosphere of unease of a white society panicking within, as a wave of darkness intrudes their skin, turning them impure, perhaps wild.
21 September 2022, 18:00 PM
Of diverse princesses and demigods: Is racebending in fantasy adaptations enough?
Progress is underway, but some studios are still hiding behind the curtain of racebending as if it will solve all of the problems of race innate to cinema itself. Nonetheless, all of it matters—Ariel and Annabeth being portrayed by young Black women—because what we read and watch feeds our imagination.
21 September 2022, 18:00 PM
‘Books must make you see things differently': Sunandini Banerjee of Seagull Books on the art of book cover design
The process of designing a book is a combination of the practical and the creative.
21 September 2022, 18:00 PM
Talent Management in the Post Pandemic World
The book recognises that human capital is the main determinant of organisational performance in modern business and knowledge-based institutional sectors.
20 September 2022, 12:04 PM
Ginsberg, Dylan, Bhowmik’s anti-war pleas still relevant today
Fifty-one years ago, in this very month of September, Allen Ginsberg visited the Jessore Road. Upon his return to America, he would write the anti-war poem “September on Jessore Road”, which would be monumental in shifting the opinions of Americans to oppose the support of Pakistan in the Liberation War.
19 September 2022, 12:33 PM
'Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Le messager du qawwali' launched at AFD
“I deeply admire Mr Khan for his glorious contribution to the music industry. Despite all the cultural differences, his songs resonate with everyone. I remember being mesmerised after witnessing his magic for the first time back home", shared author Dr Pierre-Alain Baud.
17 September 2022, 07:54 AM
ULAB Literary Salon to discuss freedom of speech today
Writers of both fiction and non-fiction have come under increasing pressure and censorship across South Asia. To discuss these issues, the fifth ULAB Lit Salon brings together a diverse group of experts drawn from policy and its practice, publishing, and media.
17 September 2022, 06:32 AM
Home in the World: The Autobiography of a Well-Known Bengali
The dust jacket cover of Amartya Sen’s absorbing and remarkable memoir shows him as a young boy, with his sister and a cousin at home, looking out at the world. An apt cover image of a fittingly titled book about someone who would be always taking in the world as he went all over
16 September 2022, 18:00 PM
Ritual
Morning sun, and its endearing ardor
swathes my spent body, I awake a ghost.
16 September 2022, 18:00 PM
I AM FROM…
I am from age-old pickle jars, and dusty ancestral bookshelves
16 September 2022, 18:00 PM
A new reader’s guide to Agatha Christie’s world of crime
Published in 1920, this was Christie’s debut novel that introduced readers to her unconventional detective, Poirot.
16 September 2022, 16:09 PM
SHOUTxDS Books presents ‘Slam Poetry Nights’ — Episode 1
The poems ranged from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.
15 September 2022, 11:58 AM
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