“The liberation war was terrifying for women and this is why Afsan Chowdhury’s book is crucial. It is important to study our culture to understand the history of our liberation war,” said Professor Sonia Nishat Amin.

When being asked how she finds the time to read, she shared that she reads backstage or in the backseat of her car, on her way to meetings or interviews, “especially if I’m into a book”.

By 1954 Jibanananda Das, after years of neglect, was beginning to gain increasing attention as a poet all over Bengal—East or West—and had a steady teaching job after a long, long time. Indeed, in 1953 he had been awarded the Rabindra-Smriti Puroshkar for his book of verse, Banalata Sen. In May, 1954 his Jibanananda Dasher Shreshto Kobita came out from a reasonably good publishing house, collecting his best poems.

The poems varied from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.

Despite the regret I felt for not studying them with honest academic interest, the goal of having to go through those academic books did provide me a sense of purpose. However, now that exams were over, I realised that I had to replace those mundane books with more fascinating ones.

After a ten-year long hiatus, Monica Ali has returned with Love-Marriage that has has caused quite a stir.

A long time ago, when I was a young writer who had just published his first collection of short stories and had just been married to a young and lovely woman, I wrote a love story in the first person, which created two unanticipated problems.

A "what it really was" analysis of the 1971 war does not mean the description of the actions of India only. It should also cover their mistakes and failures. The cover of this book claims to be a "definitive story", but its research and narrative are not holistic.

“What Men Live By” opens like a children’s story—the way Matilda or most Roald Dahl books would start out—with simple, everyday events and straightforward descriptions. Eventually, though, one line caught my attention and I couldn’t help but smile:

The stories occur in places deeply etched into many of our memories—from rooftops to buses to benches in the park to the digital world of emails and texts.

In a break from last year’s partially virtual format, this year’s event will be held at ULAB’s Permanent Campus in Beribad and its Research Building in Dhanmondi, Dhaka.

The novel opens with a photographer, the eponymous Maali Almeida, who has woken up dead in a celestial visa office, while his body sinks in the Beira Lake in Colombo. Maali has seven moons to find the man and woman he loves and lead them to  "a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka".

The movie tells the classic love story from the perspective of Juliet's cousin Rosaline, who happens to be Romeo's recent ex-girlfriend. Crushed when Romeo meets Juliet and begins to pursue her, Rosaline schemes to foil the famous romance and reclaim her man.

To me, Wilde’s novel articulates the deepest anxieties of the late Victorians and continues to offer us ways to interpret our own experiences.

Four of Arefin’s novels have been published so far, alongside three books of poetry and critically acclaimed translations of the Iliad and of Kafka’s short stories. 

The familial bond portrayed in the novel makes it easy to sympathise with the characters and they rarely seem woven in a piece of fiction; rather, their attributes are more lifelike and one may just find someone like Franny or Gillian Owens among their kith and kin.

“War is vast. It reaches across the horizon, loftier and older than peace. Killing came before war, but it might also be that refuge preceded war.

He spoke of women on equal terms at a time when women were not even people in the country where he lived (and they still are not—neither in the land of Lalon nor in the world that we proudly claim as ours.

After a two year hiatus caused by Covid-19, the 10th edition of the Dhaka Literary Festival will take place from January 5-8, 2023, at the capital’s Bangla Academy.

A portion of the donation has been given to Sanjida Akter of Natore for the treatment of her eyes. Akter was the victim of an acid attack in November last year.