I often see death hovering above everything, sticking out its tentacles, and taking someone in its mouth on a whim. Its belly is swollen with the lives it has consumed and its mouth drips with the sorrows of those. It is an invisible (to the mortals) aerial creature. It flies fast despite being so heavy. It is omnipresent, and in the ocean, it is as visible as a boat shaped moon on a mirror-like pond.

I was just up from bed; even the sun was not quite high yet. Some shalik birds were quarreling on top of the trees near the backyard gate and I was wondering how to ask mother for the plantain chops that were kept in the shika from last night's dinner.

The heart hurts when it does

“The girl who, somehow strangely resembles Ranu, raised her eyes -a slight smirk hanging in the corner of her lips” – thus ended Devi (1985), closely followed by the second of the Misir Ali sequence, Nishithini in 1986.

The Guardian's review of Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds points out how Momo, one of its characters, “complicates our picture of helpless children in refugee camps.”

I don't have it in me I'm a fire that can't ignite I'm a torch that doesn't ignite the light

I grew up with pickle jars

At the end of the waterfall of dying lights from the celestial fireball,

I met Olga Grjasnowa early this November when she came to a program at ULAB jointly hosted by the University and the Goethe Institute Bangladesh. She had a couple of sessions at the Dhaka Literary Festival too.

Each time on the eve of a new semester, it is not absolutely uncommon for any university student to feel overwhelmed for many reasons. Faces of the teachers from the bygone

Unnoticed I am going away/ Just as nobody saw me come./I clasp my hands and bow my head/As clouds puff up in the west…

I was scratching my head as I completed reading the first story in Wasi Ahmed's anthology of short stories entitled The Over Takers. I was scratching my head when I had finished the eleventh tale, also the last in the engrossing volume.

Why is there no one around? Why is no human being in view? But there are still those in the rooms set aside for them. No changes were visible thus in the quarter where Lord Husayn's kinsmen and women had been kept.

Under the perky moon, Sitting by my beloved, Surrounded with the guitar

“A girl,” the nurse had said and the mother had frowned. “A girl,” she turned those words over in her head, mumbled them slowly. “A girl,” she said to the nurse, “I hope the world would be fair to her.” The nurse looked motionless as if she heard those words coming out of every mother's mouth.

The harmonium is massive in size. Antique and made of German reeds. Though time's whiplash left dark marks on it, its exquisite face still attracts its viewers.

“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? Tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

A reader can perhaps assume from the back flap of Fayeza Hasanat's debut collection of short stories that the pieces revolve around a woman's position in society, familial relationships and identity that is constructed for her.

-“Wonder! What a wonder!”

On Wednesday, October 10, 2018, the much awaited longlist for South Asian Literature 2018 was announced by eminent historian and academic Rudrangshu Mukherjee, the chair of the jury panel for the current year for the distinguished prize.