THE SHELF / 5 books to rescue you from brainrot

This was a syncretic tale of the Sundarbans that was reinterpreted into being at Goethe-Institut Bangladesh on Saturday, June 28, by Folklore Expedition Bangladesh in a puthi path titled “Bon Bibir Jahuranama”

Aptly named Ateet Theke Adhuna: Bangladesher Naari Lekhok, this collection is unlike a conventional anthology. Starting with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the list of writers includes an impressive 66 great authors.

Shahid Alam and I go back a long way, though we had both half-forgotten it until recently. He was two years senior to me at St. Gregory’s High School.

It would rain in the rains / And the rest of this poem would be written by someone else

Then you will vanish—becoming Amma, Chachi, Mami. No one will remember your name.

The city still wants to breathe.

When I picked up Baitullah Quaderee’s 'Bangladesher Shater Dashaker Kabita', it wasn’t particularly out of scholarly curiosity. The book is, by design, a doctoral thesis—its structure conventional, its chapters arranged by academic demand—but what caught my interest was not the format, nor even the topic. It was the author himself. 

For today’s feminists, the focus isn’t just on challenging or breaking social norms, but also on asking, who gets to break these norms? And to what extent?

There’s a purgatorial break between these stretches …flaxen against the lights

At a gathering in the unfinished community hall, Saleha raises a question: "They gave us walls. But what do we want to grow inside them?"

In Lakshmi’s Secret Diary, Ari Gautier crafts a dazzling, multi-layered narrative that is as whimsical as it is profound.

Every year, on June 20, World Refugee Day calls on us to remember and hold in our hearts the millions displaced by conflict, persecution, and political upheaval around the world.

In "Daddy," the speaker's inability to speak is not merely personal trauma but a symbol of women's historical silencing.

When it comes to our fathers, especially the ones who try to be good men, a rampant affliction known as patriarchy has left us with no language to imagine them outside of what they were to others. Strip away the roles, and what’s left?

These paternal characters are not easy to love, nor can they love faultlessly themselves. Yet it is precisely this contradiction—their awkward tenderness, silent failures, and undeniable devotion—that makes them so achingly human

Her voice, thin as a whisper, sharp as a blade, sliced through the kitchen air thick with mustard oil and regret.

I am not a single name. Not a single wound.

I made my first kite out of white paper scraps; on my 16th birthday, it came to me that they needed a pop of color.

Grey chips of rough cement  Rust rubble all around,

This was the way it ended: not with fire, But carried quietly under sleep-beds,