Mohammad Nazim Uddin’s fictional offering ultimately hovers somewhere between pulp fiction and feminist commentary, but it fails to satisfy readers on either count.

Star Books Report

Goethe-Institut Bangladesh, in collaboration with Dhaka Lit Fest, North South University, and University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh, are hosting a series of author talks and readings from August to November 2021, with the aim of bringing German literature to Bangladeshi readers. 

The novel tracks the childhood of Abdul Khaleq, which comes back to the man every sleepless, teary-eyed night. The chapters alternate between these recollections—taking residence in rural 1940s Kolkata—and the now, where schoolteacher Khaleq repeats a daily Sisyphean routine in newly christened-Bangladesh.

In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and communities, and how it continues to incite violence, displacement, prejudice, and trauma among those who live in the border regions.

Won-Pyung Sohn’s Almond (HarperVia, 2021), translated to English by Sandy Josun Lee, is a mesmerizing novel that captures the heart of a reader indelibly. Fifteen-year-old Yunjae cannot feel emotions due to alexithymia and is deemed a monster by others. Feelings such as love and empathy are mere words to him. At the age of six he sees a child gang-beaten to death by other children. More than a decade later, he watches a man stab his grandmother and hammer his mother into a comatose state, without batting an eyelid. At school he is tormented and at home, he becomes aware of an ever-growing void due to the absence of a loving family, but nothing can penetrate his heart. His lonely days pass in nonchalance until one day an unusual request from a stranger ends up connecting him with another ‘monster’ named Gon. 

With this list, we bring to attention the books recently released which deal with the politics and loss associated with this defining moment in history, in the form of both fiction and nonfiction. 

The women in Selina Hossain’s books are strong, because the author herself likes to be inspired by the reality around her.

The sneaky connection between publishing industries and your growing bibliomania.

Early in July of this year, thousands of Cubans took to the streets, pushed over the course of the pandemic to a breaking point by a persistent, two-year-long shortage of medicine and—most importantly—food. Cuban protesters marched and shouted for an end to the Communist regime, which has lasted over six decades.

The book is a complete treatise on the development of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT).

Create some space in your bookshelf for these.

Chinmay Tumbe’s The Age of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World (HarperCollins, 2020) is a timely read, touching upon three historic pandemics and the effects they had on the culture, economy, and politics of the Indian subcontinent.

Fifty years old this year, the country represented in 'Golden: Bangladesh at 50' (UPL, 2021) is haunted, still, by all that it has survived, and it takes a look at all that it continues to breed, ranging from the festering to the hopeful. And so it follows that the collection feels wonderfully young, even as it comprises some of the most experienced and eminent of our writers, from Neeman Sobhan and Lubna Marium to Arif Anwar, Shazia Omar, Nadeem Zaman, Sabrina Ahmad, and many more.

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 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.

The second volume of Dhaka University: The Convocation Speeches, 1948-1970 (Dhaka University Publications, 1989), assembled assiduously by Emeritus Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, is an important publication like the first one for anyone trying to understand Dhaka University’s extraordinary role in the genesis and identity formation of Bangladesh.