Textbooks in Bangladesh tend to be written by foreign authors. Those that are written by Bangladeshi authors, emphasise on examples in a non-Bangladesh context.

Divakaruni has a message to send with this novel. To her, independence entails not just liberation or freedom from subjugation, it also means doing the right thing for oneself and for the people around us.

Although the book is written in English, he has plenty of doubt to dispense about the language, its usefulness, acceptance, and communicability when it comes to writing and creating art in Bangladesh.

It is the disease that maintains the upper hand in the plot. A jarring voice of its own, the toxins spilling across the pages in bold, chaotic words.

Part memoir, part magical realism, this is a story about identity and the idea of home.

The story of the ailing Bhawal prince, Ramendranarayan Roy, the Mejo Kumar, who while taken to Darjeeling to recuperate, died and was cremated there, under mysterious circumstances, and who then returned years later as a wandering ascetic with partial amnesia!

Andy Warhol suggested they tape their conversations on his Sony Walkman, to which Truman Capote agrees.

Nehru was revolted by Nazism and the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Bose…felt that the Indian struggle for freedom should override all other considerations.

Because of Camus, I started to believe in the idea of relative truth and realised how differently people may weigh the different aspects and incidents which occur in their lives.

The 11 short stories encompass a number of ideas, mainly the binary oppositions of the human psyche, all covering the inner conflicts of human life. 

Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhary’s chapter on the trafficking of women, with a focus on India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, teases out the differences in the lived experiences of the Adivasi, Dalit, and other marginalised women. 

A "what it really was" analysis of the 1971 war does not mean the description of the actions of India only. It should also cover their mistakes and failures. The cover of this book claims to be a "definitive story", but its research and narrative are not holistic.

The stories occur in places deeply etched into many of our memories—from rooftops to buses to benches in the park to the digital world of emails and texts.

The movie tells the classic love story from the perspective of Juliet's cousin Rosaline, who happens to be Romeo's recent ex-girlfriend. Crushed when Romeo meets Juliet and begins to pursue her, Rosaline schemes to foil the famous romance and reclaim her man.

To me, Wilde’s novel articulates the deepest anxieties of the late Victorians and continues to offer us ways to interpret our own experiences.

The familial bond portrayed in the novel makes it easy to sympathise with the characters and they rarely seem woven in a piece of fiction; rather, their attributes are more lifelike and one may just find someone like Franny or Gillian Owens among their kith and kin.

The memoir provides a good primer to Nusrat's life as a musician and the legacy he left.

In The Last White Man, Hamid uses an anodyne, clinical voice to set an atmosphere of unease of a white society panicking within, as a wave of darkness intrudes their skin, turning them impure, perhaps wild.

This book is an essential read to understand the extent of the erasure of Palestinian history after the Nakba and life under tyranny in its cities.

What point is Lord of the Rings making in 2022? That people are racist and wage wars? The original trilogy, from two decades ago, was making that same point.