YA Books to Read on Valentine’s Day

Be it the classical enemies-to-lovers trope, the fake dating trope or the infamous, and endlessly intoxicating, love triangle, the stories below have covered it all.
14 February 2021, 12:55 PM

The Reading Café opens a new branch in Banani

Popular manga, biographies, children’s books, and latest international releases across genres are expected to become available at the store within two weeks of publication.
12 February 2021, 15:13 PM

How 1952 paved the way for 1971

In this second installment, we talk about Purbo Banglar Bhasha Andolon O Totkaleen Rajneeti (The Language Movement of Bengal and Contemporary Politics), in which author and historian Badruddin Umar explains the cultural, economic, and historical context behind the Bangla language movement of 1952.
10 February 2021, 18:00 PM

For the love of books

Similar to the mimicry of life by art, sometimes a book in our hands can acutely imitate the arcs of the love story we are in, ourselves—like the time a ghost lover stole a paperback Frankenstein from the neighborhood café as a last minute birthday gift for me, while our alliance reeked of haunted loneliness and painful assertions, or when one of my friends, a doctor by day and an avid reader by night, spoke about his first encounter with Harry Potter and the “cute, sweet girl across the hall.”
10 February 2021, 18:00 PM

The Glamour and Darkness of the Spanish Dictatorship

Ruta Sepetys’s The Fountains of Silence (Penguin Books, 2019) takes place in the 1950s, in a Spain reigned by fear and stifling laws, caught between the dichotomy of non-existent human rights on the one side, and a flourishing tourist scene and wealthy visitors wooed by the national regime on the other.
10 February 2021, 18:00 PM

The Code Name for a Bloodstained Era

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist who covered Southeast Asia and Brazil for the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times respectively.
10 February 2021, 18:00 PM

Book Road Khulna: Locals donate books for a street-side book fair

The event provided the bookworms of Khulna with a unique opportunity to share their books with the community.
6 February 2021, 10:41 AM

South Asian pasts in books

Film director and activist Alamgir Kabir aired the first of his Shwadhin Bangla Betar Kendro dispatches on the Bangladesh Liberation War on June 15, 1971.
3 February 2021, 18:00 PM

Book sales and review competitions mark the beginning of February 2021

In any other year, the beginning of February would normally be marked by the month-long Amar Ekushey Boi Mela which unfolds across the Bangla Academy and Suhrawardy Udyan grounds.
3 February 2021, 18:00 PM

“Boi Mela-centric love for books poses obstacles for the publishing industry.”

Minar Mansur, the current director of the National Book Centre (Jatiya Grantha Kendro), was born on July 20, 1960 in the Barlia village of Chittagong.
3 February 2021, 18:00 PM

History, lost love, and the road not taken in Jodi Picoult’s latest novel

Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine Books, 2020) discusses with great candour the complexities of human choices, of love, regret, death, and other tumultuous complications that make up life.
3 February 2021, 18:00 PM

Testimony to the Cruel Birth of Bangladesh

Half a century from where we began, throughout this 50th year of Bangladesh, Daily Star Books will revisit and analyse some of the books that played pivotal roles in documenting the Liberation War and the birth of this nation in 1971. The last issue of every month will feature an elaborate article on these books.
27 January 2021, 18:00 PM

JK Rowling’s Disappointing Cry for Relevance

There are two kinds of children’s stories: those which you dust off as an adult and find yourself discovering new depths to upon revisiting, and those that you flick through and donate.
27 January 2021, 18:00 PM

A History of the Ulama in British India

Over the past few years, and particularly after their recent tussle with the government over the statue of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Ulama’s involvement in politics has come back under scrutiny in Bangladesh.
27 January 2021, 18:00 PM

Netflix’s ‘The White Tiger’: A Lukewarm Translation of Rage On-screen

One can’t help but be excited about Netflix’s recent attempts at bringing to life and screen valuable works of South Asian fiction. Today’s focus, The White Tiger, which premiered on Netflix on January 21, 2021, was a debut novel by the Indian-Australian writer and journalist Aravind Adiga, who won critical acclaim and the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for his critique of class and caste boundaries in India.
27 January 2021, 18:00 PM

‘A Gift for a Ghost’: Spain’s Great New Graphic Novel

Borja González is a self-taught illustrator, and you both can and cannot tell while looking at his resplendent new work, A Gift for a Ghost (Abram ComicArts, 2020).
20 January 2021, 18:00 PM

The Portrait of the Writer as a Critic

The books which are closest to my heart and which evoke a certain sense of otherworldly glee are the ones that are themselves odes to literature, reading, and writing.
20 January 2021, 18:00 PM

On Gender Mainstreaming and Governance in South Asia

Despite much of the conversations and advances across countries since the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), gender mainstreaming still lacks a solid theoretical grounding, primarily because it grew outside academia as a movement under the ambit of feminism, and not as a part of social science.
20 January 2021, 18:00 PM

Farida Hossain, Writing with Grace

On October 9, 1965—a day before the World Children’s Day celebrations—the Engineering Institute of Dhaka rang with the melody of young voices, their footfalls and bright costumes. Children from across the two Pakistans had been invited to take part in a competition of musical performances.
19 January 2021, 11:40 AM

Tintin: A flawed hero that every kid needs to know

Read our tribute to Tintin comics online, on The Daily Star website,
13 January 2021, 18:00 PM