As a tiny five-year old in the ’80s, I first discovered and liberated an Archie comic from a teenage cousin the way oil rich countries are liberated: by force. I used superior tactics of crying, pleading, whining and bargaining.

Two strange events took place in November 2016; Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 48th President of the United States, and George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, suddenly became a best seller again.

I picked up this book while trying to find a good therapist in this dreary land.

Twelve years ago, Suzanne Collins introduced us to The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press), a dystopian world where children fight to their televised deaths in a brutal annual competition.

Instead of the thrill of meeting friends and professors in a bustling, energised campus, going back to school only involves a computer this September.

As humans we teeter on the oddest of precipices. We are only animals: apes unusually adept at surviving Earth’s harsh playbook for life. Like the multitude of organisms we share it with, we live, multiply, and without exception, we die.

Korean literature has been enjoying a literary renaissance for quite some time through translation, from the likes of Hang Kang’s beguiling yet gruesome novel, The Vegetarian (2007) to Yeonmi Park’s heart wrenching memoir, In Order to Live (2015).

When The Fault in Our Stars (2012) first released, it brought on a powerful surge of change, not only in our reading lists, but in our perception of terminal and mental diseases and even to the genre itself.

When we think of migration, the images in our collective narratives are constructed primarily with masses of people on the move, leaving places they belong in for foreign lands. In her latest book, Sonia Shah, an American science journalist and author, critically takes apart the boundaries around human wandering both in our lands and our mind-sets.

Migration of Bengalis from South Asia to the outside world started with taking up jobs as lascars (sailors) in the British East India Company's ships which carried precious goods from the Indian subcontinent, such as spice, tea and cotton. In addition, from the second half of the nineteenth century, Bengali educated and wealthy gentlemen began travelling to England mainly to pursue higher education.

Ironically a book without images or photographs, On Photography collects American philosopher, filmmaker and activist Susan Sontag’s essays on the history of photography, its inherent voyeurism, and how it affects the way we perceive and experience the modern world through an often capitalist lens.

Something that has always fascinated me about Bangladeshi literature is it’s attachment to and exploration of space—be it in prose, poetry, or music, almost all Bangladeshi and even Bengali literary work engages with how we are impacted by land, home, country, season, and other natures of charged atmosphere.

The novel is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl. Bahar died in a fire after her family home—a secular and intellectual space—in Tehran is stormed by fanatics.

Good books – even as they are arresting – are often hard to read. This is not because they are difficult in themselves so much because oftheir content.

Everyone had them on their bookshelves. Everyone read them and fawned over them. Online stores were getting creative with the contents of these young-adult fantasy books, coming up with themed candles, beautifully designed bookmarks, and exclusive sticker packs. It was almost as though the genre had developed a cult following of its own.

One day many years ago, discovering my cousin’s tattered copy of a Give Yourself Goosebumps book completely changed my ideas about what books could be.

Three years before Maloy Krishna Dhar’s death, his memoir, Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal (Penguin India, 2009), came out. Born in a sleepy village of Kamalpur in the Bhairab-Mymensingh region next to Meghna and Brahmaputra, Dhar had an illustrious career as a teacher, journalist, intelligence officer, and writer.

A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had.

On the first day of this month, 76 years ago, Anne Frank wrote her last diary entry. Three days later, on August 4, the building she was hiding in with her family and four family friends was raided by the Gestapos.

Shirley (2020), directed by Josephine Decker and adapted by Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 eponymous novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, interweaves fact and fiction into an imagined narrative about the time when author Shirley Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman (1951).