Essay / A beginner’s guide to ‘Khwabnama’

31 July 2026, 00:00 AM Books & Literature
In the year 1996, just a year before his untimely death, Aktaruzzaman Elias had published his magnum opus, Khwabnama.

Poetry / You ask me
25 July 2026, 00:00 AM ⁠⁠Poetry
Book Review: Fiction / The queen who would not stay dead
23 July 2026, 00:00 AM Books & Literature
Fiction / Lira’s glasses
19 July 2026, 19:00 PM ⁠⁠Fiction
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.
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

Making a killing out of a killing

A visit to any bookshop today will attest to the reading public’s fascination with crime (and criminals).
11 October 2023, 18:00 PM

Blood, rage and love on the verge of 1971

Reading Rahad Abir’s Bengal Hound, despite the novel being written in English, felt a lot like reading in Bangla. While no two languages can ever truly be compared, there is much to be said about seeing Bangla and Bangladesh through an English language lens.
11 October 2023, 18:00 PM

It’s a Love Story, baby just say yes

Sameer’s mother looked at her husband before quickly stepping in and attempting to defuse the situation. “You know it’s just a heritage thing. We’re not really Biharis".
11 October 2023, 15:55 PM

Journey to Jerusalem

After our spiritual journey to the Old City and West Bank, the realities of life caught up to us.
11 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Falastin

News from Gaza rips the heart open/ Idlib is burning too
10 October 2023, 15:55 PM

7 nonfiction books to understand the question of Palestine

We highlight seven nonfictional books that allow us to understand the history and discourse around the struggle better.
10 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Norwegian author Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

He told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that he was “surprised but also not” to have won.
9 October 2023, 15:55 PM

War still rages on

We might never know how it feels when your whole existence is denied or the loss of homeland, but we can get a little glimpse of their suffering.
9 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Muse of Melodies

Eurydice, his beloved,  lost to the shades, In the underworld's depths,  where darkness pervades.
8 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Dancing on the pages

This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.
8 October 2023, 05:00 AM

Eyeball to eyeball at Lords: A Bangladeshi occasion in a very English setting

35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.
7 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Of love, longing, and music that make us

My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.
6 October 2023, 18:00 PM

The sound of Dhaka city

Once on a particularly smothering hot day, on a CNG ride to work, I was stuck in the most heinous traffic for over two hours. Over the yelling drivers, honking cars, and incessant cursing over why the CNGs were trying to overtake the expensive cars, I was listening to my usual cycle of songs. As coincidence would have it, David Gilmour in his seraphic voice posed the question: “So, so you think you can tell/ Heaven from hell?”
6 October 2023, 18:00 PM

Shokoruno Benu Bajaie Ke Jai

Who is the one playing such a plaintive tune on a flute
6 October 2023, 18:00 PM

“We need writers to know what society will look like in the future”

A large number of contemporary writers in the country think of avoiding politics. But that itself is also a kind of politics—the politics of the status quo.
6 October 2023, 13:38 PM

Poet Asad Chowdhury no more

With the publication of his first collection of poems, Tabak Deya Paan in 1975, Bangla literary scene witnessed the emergence of a powerful new voice.
5 October 2023, 13:55 PM

Music and the space it creates for literature

I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.
4 October 2023, 18:00 PM

On music and literature in a Postcolonial context

As someone who is interested in Muslim novels—by which I mean novels written by Muslims about Muslims—I always feel a scholarly tug towards Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (Scribner, 1995) when speaking of the at times uneasy but mostly comfortable marriage between music and literature.
4 October 2023, 18:00 PM

Book-Buzz back with its second iteration

Ushinor Majumdar’s book details how, since Partition, the Pakistan military junta had continued to exert unjust power over Bengal and its resident Bengalis.
2 October 2023, 14:00 PM

Snow White: A grim fairy tale

Before The Brothers Grimm published their version of the story, titled Sneewittchen, the original Italian folktale was about a mother’s envy and jealousy towards her own daughter.
30 September 2023, 15:55 PM
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