FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

For World Book Day on April 23, we bring together a list of books about books as a means to glimpse at and tap into the vast knowledge, power, and pleasure that is to be found in these complex objects. Are they, indeed, just objects? Or historical artefacts? Or weapons?

At the start of Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, A Time Outside This Time (Aleph Book Company, 2021), the main character Satya, an Indian-born US-based journalist, is at a swanky artists’ retreat in Italy where he is reading 1984

How is it that the privileged lives of the British upper classes, in a period of time which lasted arguably less than a decade, have managed to leave behind such an impressive legacy in English literature?

now i see you in summer the kind  that came, before rain  could  settle us April, the beginning of it -

“Today it seems to me that every festival in Santiniketan offered homage to the seasons in some form or other… Much later I learnt that the festivals of Santhals and other Adivasis are the expressions of respect for farming and forest life. There are forms of nature worship based on an advantage of the earth as a primal mother.”

The Baishakhi fairgrounds is just a stone’s throw away from the Doyagonj Bridge, where grandpa always takes Rony for afternoon walks.

My city has turned off all its lights. And then someone has muddied, all the road-marks and signs.

“When I was born, Rabindranath persuaded my mother that it was boring to stick to well-used names and he proposed a new name for me…Amartya”, writes the author and economist.

“Absence is the highest form of presence.” This Joycean quote could not be truer for Nisha.

Kabuliwala and Other Stories is a collection of twelve outstanding stories of Rabindranath Tagore, translated into English by Prof Shawkat Hussain, a former professor of the Department of English, University of Dhaka.

Etched a figurine, taking dots and lines and curves Xeroxed our desires weaving through the blurs

The very day in bless’d disarray, this is no time to stay in place. As begging kids and homeless dogs flee the chasing skies above,

This past March, Sahitya Akademi and Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature (FOSWAL) arranged an online Literature Conference on “Environment and Literature” with participation from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Reversal of fairy tale tropes and themes of mental health and alienation run dominantly across One Minute Past Midnight (Nymphea Publications, 2022), a debut collection of poetry and prose by poet and teacher Arshi Mortuza. 

In Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury, 2021), you write that the author’s British publisher, Christopher MacLehose, was in a dilemma to decide on Sebald’s genre of writing. After writing about his novel and his life for so long, how would you define Sebald’s genre?

One of the most searing scenes in Lee Lai’s magnificent graphic novel, Stone Fruit (Fantagraphics, 2021) is when a young child, Nessie,

What makes them my favourites, if I can’t remember the names of the engrossing characters or the details of the intricate plots in some of my “favourite” books?

Selvadurai’s book, set against the backdrop of escalating political tension in Sri Lanka prior to the 1983 riots, portrays the effect of the Tamil-Sinhalese clash on the personal lives of his characters, before giving a glimpse of the riots in the very last chapter.

Each hardcover spine contains the story of how Nora’s life would have turned out if she had chosen differently—if she had picked a different career path, moved to a different country or married a different person.

It was not very late when he saw her inside the cafe.