Review: Short story of the month / Anxiety, unmarriedness, and ‘An Eye and a Leg’
4 hour(s) ago
Books & Literature
Anxiety as an emotion is revelatory of not only individual fears, but structural ones.
Book review: Fiction / Three realms, one unforgettable love story
4 hour(s) ago
Books & Literature
Poetry / Ode to my girls
2 August 2026, 21:31 PM
Poetry
Essay / A beginner’s guide to ‘Khwabnama’
31 July 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
Book review: Nonfiction / Witnessing Alzheimer’s through Ernaux’s unflinching prose
31 July 2026, 00:00 AM
Books & Literature
News Report / The Booker Prize 2026 longlist blends acclaimed authors with fresh literary voices
30 July 2026, 16:10 PM
News
Event Report / “We do not live outside history”: Dr. Azfar Hussain on humanism, fascism, and the July Uprising
26 July 2026, 16:24 PM
News
Essay / The writing’s boring, so he’s a third-class writer
25 July 2026, 00:00 AM
Essay
Poetry / You ask me
25 July 2026, 00:00 AM
Poetry
Interview / In conversation with Sonia Bahl: Author of ‘Eighteen Inches Apart’
What becomes increasingly evident across Bahl’s three novels is her sustained fascination with the emotional significance of almosts and maybes.
Event Report / Letters across a lifetime: The 20th staging of Love Letters
21 June 2026, 17:40 PM
News Report / Kazuo Ishiguro set to return with new novel in 2027
20 June 2026, 15:18 PM
Event Report / “Our Story”: Where parents and children made memories by hand
15 July 2026, 21:38 PM
News Report / Jamir Nazir wins 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize following AI review
3 July 2026, 20:09 PM
News Report / NSU DEML offers certificate course in creative writing for the second time
16 June 2026, 22:03 PM
Event Report / Dhaka Zine Mela 2026: A celebration of creativity and community
11 June 2026, 17:39 PM
Interview / Kishwar Chowdhury on Bangali culture and culinary storytelling
11 June 2026, 00:00 AM
When the MasterChef favourite Kishwar Chowdhury and writer Samai Haider caught up to talk about Chowdhury’s debut cookbook Smoke, Rice, Water (Hardie Grant Books, 2026), the conversation quickly morphed into something much larger than publishing deadlines and recipe testing.
Interview / Diaspora, national identity and reality TV with Pajtim Statovci
9 June 2026, 21:48 PM
News Report / Marjane Satrapi, voice of exile and resistance, dies at 56
4 June 2026, 17:58 PM
Satrapi offered a deeply personal account of life under Iran’s Islamic regime while creating a story that resonated with readers worldwide
The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days
18 June 2026, 17:04 PM
The Shelf
You know when the sky trades its brightness for a low, silver hue, and you wrap your fingers tightly around your tea, seeking that small, steady pulse of warmth. This is the essence of healing fiction. Often rooted in the Japanese concept of iyashikei, these stories focus on the quiet spirit through small, everyday moments. You may have already heard of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop or We’ll Prescribe You a Cat. While those popular favourites have opened a door for many, there are a few other tales worth the read.
Reflections / In the age of AI allegations
13 June 2026, 00:00 AM
Creative Nonfiction / Our Eids and Puja in Azimpur
30 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Essay / Ghosts in the secretariat: Mapping the Bangladeshi Gothic
7 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Book Review: Fiction / Agency, identity, and the rewriting of Medusa
1 May 2026, 00:00 AM
Fiction / Body Selim
18 April 2026, 00:00 AM
News Report / Two Bangladeshi writers make 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist
14 April 2026, 16:54 PM
Tarana Husain Khan's 'The Begum and the Dastan': Patriarchy is a labyrinth that defies time
I am convinced that while writing her book, The Begum and the Dastan (Westland Publications, 2021), Tarana Husain Khan’s aim was to leave her readers in a literary stupor, dizzy and yearning for more.
15 September 2021, 18:00 PM
The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist looks to the future
The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist was revealed on September 15, with six of the previously announced 13-novel longlist making the cut. Each of the six authors are to receive GBP 2,500, while the winner, to be announced on November 3 at the BBC Radio Theatre, will receive GBP 5,000. Notably, and much like 2020’s competition, only one British author is named in the shortlist.
15 September 2021, 13:00 PM
UPL launches Ananda Bikash Chakma’s new book, ‘Carpus Mahal Theke Shanti Chukti'
Dr Anand Bikash Chakma, Associate Professor at the department of History, Chittagong University, launched his book, Carpus Mahal Theke Shanti Chukti: Parbotto Chattogram-e Rashtrio Nitir Itihash (University Press Limited, 2021), at a virtual programme organised by UPL on September 9, 2021.
12 September 2021, 09:29 AM
The Plague in Bengal: Literary Glimpses and Anecdotes
About 122 years before the Covid-19 pandemic Bengal was struck by bubonic plague, which has left its traces in Bangla fiction and life writings.
10 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Obhoy’s Insomnia
An abrupt noise woke Obhoy up in the middle of the night and throughout the rest of the night his eyelids would not shut. What was the matter with him? He had been sound asleep; then suddenly he woke up as if someone was battering at the gate of his senses.
10 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Bookcentric announces September 2021 reading challenge
Dhaka’s Bookcentric library has announced their September 2021 reading challenge in collaboration with Daily Star Books. For this month, Bookcentric will look at books that feature a “utopia” or, conversely, a “dystopia”, given their thematic similarities, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) to Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), among others.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi': How real is the world we imagine?
In the 1700s, there lived an Italian artist, architect, and archaeologist who saw in the world far more than what was in it. Giovanni Battista Piranesi captured his world, among other things, through prints: the most famous of which are the Views, an imitation of the classical remains of Rome, and the imaginary renditions of the Prisons.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Jalal-Ud-Din Ahmad: A headmaster’s memoir
Pursuit of Excellence in Teaching: A Memoir (University Press Limited, 2021) chronicles the life and legacy of Jalal-Ud-Din Ahmad, a gifted educator who grew up to be the first graduate in his village in Feni, East Pakistan, and whose humble beginnings culminated in his winning the Presidential Award for “Best Headmaster in Pakistan” in 1967.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM
The allure of the campus novel
In Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, whose review rests atop this article, the narrator labels time not by calendar dates but by the things that happen to him—the birds who visit his wing of the world, the tides that come swinging or gently.
8 September 2021, 18:00 PM
JCB Prize for Literature announces 2021 longlist
The annual competition, which has been hailed as “India's most valuable literature prize”, offers INR 2,500,000 (USD 35,000) to its winner for distinguished work of fiction by an Indian writer working in or translated to English.
8 September 2021, 07:28 AM
Hardback edition released of ‘Inherited Memories’, Goethe-Institut and Zubaan Books’ project on the 1947 partition
Zubaan Books has released a hardback edition of Inherited Memories: Third Generation Perspectives on Partition in the East, concerning the still-felt ramifications of the 1947 partition.
5 September 2021, 11:37 AM
Story of Bengal and Bengalis: The Bengali Homeland and its Inhabitants
With the onset of the new millennium in the 21st century, there seems to be a revival of interest in the space, in the eastern part of South Asia, historically known as Bengal, and the people who inhabit this space, the Bengalis.
3 September 2021, 18:00 PM
FEMALE WARRIORS
I had decided to write a brief review of Selima Chowdhury’s book when it was first published, but what with one thing or another making me put it off, a couple of years rolled by, and we found ourselves caught up in a pandemic with no end in sight.
3 September 2021, 18:00 PM
ABUL MANSUR AHMAD: Our Language and our Literature
On the occasion of the birth anniversary of author, journalist, and politician Abul Mansur Ahmad (1898-1979) on September 3, 2021, we publish an excerpt from his essay, "Our Language and Our Literature", first published in The Concept magazine in 1965 and later collected in the book, 'End of a Betrayal and Restoration of Lahore Resolution' (1975).
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Radio, ghazals, and “Islami gaan”: What Nazrul’s shift to music said about his syncretism
The adoption of the ghazal by Nazrul, with renewed fervour in the late ’20s and ’30s, signaled an understanding that his earlier literary and linguistic world was an impermanent one, as was a politics in which the unity of Hindus and Muslims was achieved through an appeal to a shared culture and language.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Radhika Singha's 'The Coolie's Great War': The forgotten ones of World War I
As of December 31, 1919, a total of 1.4 million Indians were recruited to various theatres of the First World War. Among them, approximately 563,369 were “followers or non-combatants”.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’: Fragments of an uprooted people
The people we meet in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (Viking, 2021) are haunted by terrible tragedies from several years past, by a beautiful island divided into two.
1 September 2021, 18:00 PM
BOOKCENTRIC READING CHALLENGE: Readers review nautical books
From August 2021, Daily Star Books was excited to have joined Bookcentric’s monthly reading challenge, which invites readers to read and review books following each month’s designated theme. Under August’s theme of books with nautical themes, here is what our readers read—and reviewed—last month!
1 September 2021, 12:53 PM
In ‘Toward Happy Civilization’, a portrait of desperation
Typical of any Samanta Schweblin story from her International Booker-longlisted collection, Mouthful of Birds (OneWorld, 2019), a sense of anxiety is strongly perceptible here, especially through the characters Fi and Pe. One grows afraid of them as they start showing both lovingly caring and Big Brother-like tendencies. What heightens the ominous halo surrounding these two is the hostages’ inability to translate their emotions; why would someone who provides for you not give you a way out?
31 August 2021, 15:03 PM
At long last, a ‘Foundation’
Originally published as a series of short stories in the 1940s, the Foundation series—expanded later with a string of prequels and sequels—became Asimov’s greatest contribution to the genre and remains, to this day, one of the greatest reads for any SF connoisseur.
30 August 2021, 07:28 AM
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