Popular actor Ferdous has written his first novel, which he hopes to release at the forthcoming Ekushey Boi Mela.

Journal for Service Quality Enhancement (JSQE), a new international academic journal devoted to the development and improvement of service quality in business and commerce, was launched on July 31, 2021.

Over the years, Dahl’s work in children’s literature has amassed quite the legacy in pop culture, with actor-director Danny DeVito’s silver screen adaptation of Matilda only adding to the novel’s popularity. Looking at the anniversary today, I can’t help but wonder if the magical children’s icon from the late ‘80s can continue to exert the same amount of influence over young minds. Fourth-grade Rasha would have gleefully said ‘Yes’ in a heartbeat, but as a young adult, I believe there is some reflecting to be done. 

This year, British Asian book blogger Minaal Reid, known on Instagram as @minaal.reads, brought the celebration of South Asian Heritage Month to bookstagram by hosting a collaborative project featuring several South Asian content creators on Instagram. The hashtag #SouthAsianHeritageMonth was launched by Minaal with a seven-slide post outlining the scheduled programmes programs and participants, with the goal of having South Asian communities all over social media interact with each other through online content creation, while simultaneously diversifying the concept of South Asian identities on the same platforms. 

Good Touch Bad Touch, written in Bangla, is a 30-page book filled with stories, illustrations, and charts that are designed to be emotionally interactive for parents and their children; the prose comprises bedtime stories that seek to clarify how a child can identify abuse.

Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Beloved Rongomala', translated from the Bangla novel, 'Shokhi Rongomala' (Bengal Publications, 2015), by Shabnam Nadiya, will now be published by India’s Eka imprint of Westland Publications. The novel tells the story of Queen Phuleswari, a child bride, and of Rongomala, a woman of legend—a low caste mistress to the king who protested the limits to which her rights were confined by the class and caste prejudices of 18th century southern Bengal.

In Metaphor, David Punter reads Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) which draws upon Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1921) for its title, arguing that the centre is “responsible for the very social, political and cultural problems now being encountered in Africa, and perhaps globally” (117).

A Brief History of Silence (by Manu Dash) was an enjoyable read on my silent rooftop spanning a silent week. But as I sat on the silent table for a review, I sat amazed and brooding. The poet must have had a frightful toil, and it’s not easy to write a poem on his silence by shifting, correcting, combining, constructing, expurgating, expunging and tasting words, phrases, images as well as the empty spaces between them to pen his dreams and intellect. And I wonder what is left for me to write more on it!

"I want to propose a deal with the Bazar."

I see it in the words, Where your hand dragged over the wet ink.

For wounded soldiers rarely feel, Of throbbing hearts and broken skin.

Not even the asters accepting your gaze.

Incontestable.

I would remember a face like this if I had seen it around.

I am a photo of a person, printed in black and white, in a newspaper.

The sound of your voice is a song.

Where could they live happily for the rest of their childhood?

The creatures of the dark feed on fear. And hot sauce.

In this addition to this series, following up on the previous installment’s focus on nonfiction narratives of Birangonas’s lives and experiences, we recall Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s '1971' (2015) and Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Talaash' (2004), two books that can be considered as significant exceptions to the trend mentioned above, and also as examples of the politics of representation, objectification of women, and the desensitisation of lived experiences of trauma.

Before I knew it, I developed a personal relationship with the book. I was glued from beginning till end. I read slowly. Sometimes I read the same section twice. I could not focus on anything else till I finished. The experience was psychedelic: an expansion of the mind (imagination). In the end, the second omen worked. I was out of depression. Ricardo was right: “a good book (or film) can pull you out of depression”.