What to read / What we’re reading this week
14 May 2026, 00:00 AM
What to read
Book Review: Nonfiction / Fara Dabhoiwala’s history misses the one thing that truly matters
1 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Non-fiction review
Reflection / Harper Lee at 100: An enduring echo of justice
28 April 2026, 20:10 PM
Literature
Tribute / Humayun Azad and the courage to dissent
24 April 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
Interview / Writing what silence carries: Mohua Chinappa on memory, pain, and inheritance
24 April 2026, 00:00 AM
Features
Not just child’s play: Bengal’s rhymes as cultural memory
13 April 2026, 20:12 PM
Culture
Book Review: Nonfiction / Love, wounds, and the making of ‘Hemingway’s Women’
10 April 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
An Ekushey Book Fair breaking with tradition
21 September 2025, 13:05 PM
Books & Literature
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / An outlandish jumble of cults, cannibalism, and colonial violence
19 March 2025, 18:00 PM
Books
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / The making of Bangladesh in the global sixties
19 March 2025, 18:00 PM
Books
Teacher Tales with SHOUT and Daily Star Books!
Did you watch our very special Teacher’s Day Facebook and YouTube Live with the immensely popular Professor Asrar Chowdhury of
7 October 2020, 18:00 PM
Publishing platforms for South Asian writers
Unpublished short stories of between 2,000-5,000 words written in English, Bangla, Chinese, French, Greek, Turkish and several other
7 October 2020, 18:00 PM
The Nest
(I guess) some birds don’t return to roosts.
2 October 2020, 18:00 PM
Farewell, Dear Moon
Body trembling, tears falling
2 October 2020, 18:00 PM
La Luna
Every once in a moonlit midnight
2 October 2020, 18:00 PM
Cricket in the Dock: A Duty of Care
Cricketers are accustomed to hearing about cricket balls being caught but not of a ball being brought into Court. Appeals concerning a ball at Lords, home of cricket, are familiar enough but an Appeal in the Lords? In 1951 cricket figured in a landmark legal decision in the House of Lords.
2 October 2020, 18:00 PM
Revisiting the only book written by an Indian about the Indian soldiers of WWI
Tens of thousands of men sailed across the ocean to a land they’d never before heard the name of. They fought long and hard, in the world’s
30 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Should we separate art from the artist?
When I was in 9th grade, a friend introduced me to the works of director Lars von Trier, starting with the film Dogville (2003). I’d never seen a feature film play out so well, in such intensity, with nothing but a largely empty sound stage for a film set.
30 September 2020, 18:00 PM
A family comes undone in Leesa Gazi’s ‘Hellfire’
Bright and cold on a winter afternoon, in the hours leading up to lunch, the kitchen of a Bengali family sizzles with tension. Refrigerated meat is thawed and spices are crushed and pestled.
30 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Of Fireflies and Slime
I stood before the door of the house where my grandmother once lived. Age and infirmity had jaded what might have once been a proper door.
25 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Sand and Water
Shutters clicked away. Flashes dazzled eyes. News reporters jostled with each other to hold out their mikes as far as their arms allowed. Busy fingers gripped their ballpoints tighter.
25 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Hot mess—Andrea Bartz’s ‘The Herd’
When it comes to book reviews, I have found an interesting paradox—the better a book is, the easier it becomes to write about.
23 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Around the world in 80 books with David Damrosch
Literary historian David Damrosch’s travails with World Literature are charted most often by those within academia. During the Covid-19 inertia
23 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Sketchy memories
Travis Dandro’s King of King Court: A Memoir (Drawn & Quarterly, 2019) is a large, dense book that reads light and fast. The coming of age story is packed with the raw emotional power of the author’s traumatic childhood.
23 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Nabil Rahman yearns for big truths with few words in ‘Water Bodies’
About this book, I’d like to speak simply. Because Nabil Rahman’s Water Bodies (Nokta/ Boobook, 2020) speaks simply too, without frills or embellishment.
23 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Commute of an old man
Year 2060: I was a lonely kid. Sometimes I felt as if I lived my whole life alone. There were different people here and there, flittering in and out, at the intersection where our lives crossed, before the roads untangled and moved apart.
18 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Mathematics and Poetry: Some Impressions
I think I’ve always loved mathematics in my own ways.
18 September 2020, 18:00 PM
‘Ajob Deshe Alice’: Alice’s adventures now in Bangla
Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland (1865)
16 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Humans are innately evil, and other lies we tell ourselves
At some point in time, we decided cynicism was synonymous with intelligence and wisdom. We praised cynics for their realism and scoffed at those who held onto fairy tales.
16 September 2020, 18:00 PM
Must reads out from Bangladesh in 2020
The 40 poems and photographs of wooden sculptors in Water Bodies reflect poet-artist Nabil Rahman’s experiences with art, immigration, intergenerational trauma, artificial intelligence, spirituality, and more.
16 September 2020, 18:00 PM