FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

No need to wonder what you are: Bengal’s brightest, closest star in the night sky - though on the Earth none noticed your auspicious birth.

Tahmima Anam’s play Shahrazad, written for UK-based arts organisation Komola Collective and live streamed on October 29, 2020, adopts the

In 2016, while already involved in conducting school-wide workshops on the topic, Sharmin Kabir began to think of ways in which adolescents could be taught about menstrual health in a friendly manner. “What would the children be left with once the workshop was over and Sharmin and her team had left?” she wondered.

I’ve long come to accept that there’s no such thing as a suitable adaption of a favourite book. Yet, when it was announced that Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), a novel I have loved through the decades, was going to be adapted by the BBC for a miniseries—and directed by Mira Nair, no less—I couldn’t help but feel hopeful about the possibilities. Could this really be… the one?

“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable,” Thucydides wrote in The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Bangladeshi author Shaheen Akhtar has been awarded the 3rd Asian Literary Award for her novel Talaash (Mowla Brothers, 2009), which depicts the lasting suffering of Birangona women—survivors of sexual violence during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war.

An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca seemed especially well-timed, with its theme of imprisonment at home, as well as the timeless pull of social expectations on one’s identity.

Literature can help. It strengthens your mind, gives it a break from reality, helps you see things from a different perspective. It can take you to another time and place.

When I was a child, every night, I’d ask my parents to tell me a story when they tucked me into bed. From talking trees to scheming foxes, the mystical realm of Bengali folklore was a bottomless well from which my pre-adolescent mind drank with thirst. It led me to what can only be deemed as the Holy Grail of Bengali folklore: Thakurmar Jhuli (1907).

Effigies with their own minds, tinkling music boxes, mysterious cracks in the wall, and a long-haired spectre trailing the grounds of a vast,

Rumaan Alam is interested in contradictions—our presumptions of who should own what, in the textures of modern life.

Halloween is merely a cover--our lives seem plenty steeped in horror this year, confined within physical and psychological walls, breathing in

On the 132nd birth anniversary of Eugene O’Neill, the Shakespeare of American Theater, the question is: did he ever die?

A discussion of Translation and its theories often remains circumscribed to a discourse arguing about the issues of authenticity.

With the US elections looming, the tabloids are mostly fixated on the orange man. Few know about the roles of his calmer and more composed counterpart,

I am not a Bangladeshi immigrant living in a Bangladeshi neighbourhood somewhere in Kilburn, London like Samad Iqbal and his family from White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton, 2000).

As of this writing, the United States is currently in the final weeks of its most partisan and controversial presidential election in 150 years,

Hashim & Family (John Murray, 2020) takes us on a journey across two countries, spanning two decades. It begins with the titular Hashim moving from East Pakistan to Manchester in the 1960s in hopes of a better living, inspired by his cousin Rofikul, himself an immigrant of a few years.

The spirits of the forest

Something missing from this dish and that.