FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

I slip into your hut and salvage bones, a soul,

We know Body Selim. If you look around, you’ll find that after this incident, many people came to know him through the newspapers.

Aruna Chakravarti is a doyen of historical fiction, spinning out narratives on the Bengal Renaissance with her Jorasanko (HarperCollins, 2013) novels, reviving the story of the Bhawal Prince with The Mendicant Prince (Pan Macmillan, 2022) and doing series of fictitious short stories based on chronicles from the past.

It sounds flippant to put it that way but, the Aeneid, at its core, really is a continuation fic—picking up where Homer’s Trojan War ended and following Aeneas, a minor character in the canon, as he stumbles through an entirely new narrative along with original characters and incredibly expanded lore.

May love guide our path forward May joy bring us together. Shubho noboborsho and long live resistance.

In London, the celebrations are smaller and more intentional. They are arranged around busy schedules, often taking place in someone’s home rather than out in the open. There are food, music, and conversation—familiar elements, but quieter and on a smaller scale. There is a different kind of intimacy here: a sense that the celebration exists because we must make space for it, all of us gathering to recreate something of what we remember.

Two Bangladeshi writers—26-year-old Anmana Manishita, a lecturer at BRAC University, and 33-year-old Shazed Ul Hoq Abir, a lecturer at East West University—have been shortlisted for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

But it goes without saying that Rabindranath, as the most famous member of the Tagore family and one of the cornerstones of Bengali culture, is thoroughly intertwined with the most significant day of the Bengali calendar. His thoughts on PohelaBaishakh are complex and evolved over the years, alongside his own development as an artist and the changing societal circumstances, as can be seen through his three essays on this day.

Folklorists have long recognised multiple categories within Bengali folk literature—songs, proverbs, riddles, and rhymes. Rhymes are not homogeneous; they appear in distinct functional types: nursery rhymes, social or satirical rhymes, occupational rhymes, ritual rhymes, and those associated with games. That diversity signals not triviality, but embeddedness. In their rhythmic repetition are folded patterns of labour, hierarchy, crisis and adaptation.

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.

Romance has never existed apart from inequality. The genre depends on distance—on obstacles that make love feel hard-won.

Some books announce their ambition quietly. Others reveal it at a glance.

Here are five books that celebrate the curiosity that took us to the moon. Not for conquest, but for humanity, and for the simple, profound need to know.

When I first landed in Melbourne in January, the heat greeted me like a shockwave. 45 degrees Celsius, feeling like 48.

You should never judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge a person by the covers lining their bookshelf.

The 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, recognizing six outstanding works of fiction from around the world translated into English. The award, known formerly as the Man Booker International Prize, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

In my early 20s, I moved to New York and started going to a commuter college. I lived far from campus, so in order to get to school, I had to take a bus and then the subway, adding up to an hour of commute each way. My classmates all commuted from various parts of the city; some of them ran to work right after classes. Having been surrounded by friends all my life and not yet knowing how to enjoy my own company, I felt extremely lonely.

Finding an independent bookstore in a new city is one of my most cherished travel experiences.

And womanhood? Well, it is messier. But it is mine. No longer something handed to me by men or mothers or traditions. Just mine.

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.