Daily Star Books
ESSAY / Humayun Ahmed and the language of Bangladeshi novels
His written language came close to spoken language due to the primitive and original style of Bengali syntax—simple sentence structures.
Book Review: Nonfiction / The minority report in India
In Another India, Pratinav Anil unambiguously faults Nehruvian secularism—the very mantle championed by historians such as Mushirul Hasan for whom “the congress best represented the Muslim interests from the fifties on.”
EDITORIAL / On moving
Reading moves you. The movement is emotional—you feel moved as you read, you feel moved by what you read. To read is to be moved—by the sheer joy and ecstasy on the pages, by the pain and heartache in the letters,
ESSAY / ‘Bare life’ and Partition
“Can one break a country...Will the earth bleed?” asks eight-year-old Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)–a tale about Partition. “No one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!”
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / The straight and narrow vision of ‘Crook Manifesto’
Colson Whitehead’s sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021) is a continuation of the exact same order.
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Sports journalism and Bangladesh
Textbooks in Bangladesh tend to be written by foreign authors. Those that are written by Bangladeshi authors, emphasise on examples in a non-Bangladesh context.
The "original and thrilling": The Booker Prizes announces 2023 longlist
The novels are small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language. Together, they offer startling portraits of the current.
Essay / What I mean when I say “listening to books”
Listening is stretching beyond ourselves and another, and if we were to listen to printed words on paper as non-verbal cues of communication, it too emits lower frequencies that moves us, beyond the I, towards new modes of knowledge.
Review: Nonfiction / Tech bias: not a glitch, but a structural problem
With statistics backing her up, Broussard does a stellar job of portraying this bias for the readers with stories from individuals who have faced such discrimination. The book opens with the story of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams who gets wrongfully identified by a police facial recognition technology and gets taken into custody.
Book Review: Nonfiction / An odyssey of love and loss
Having read an account of someone who stood by her husband and helped him through an assisted suicide out of love was extremely heart-wrenching.
ESSAY / The bitter-sweet world of self-help books
The concept of self-improvement is by no means a new one, rather the notion is in the foundational structures of moral well-being. The centuries old Socrates commandment, “Know Thyself” is at the very crux of what self-improvement consists of.
Remembering Melville in his bicentenary year
Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.
The Potenga harlots’ tale
In Koshobi, Jaladas paints the damp and dejected walls of Strandroad, Shahebpara, which is a local red-light district more than 300 years old.
Remembering Mahasweta Devi: The blueprint of subaltern activism and literature
While novelists such as Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Sanjeeb Chandra Chattopadhyay adopted an ambiguous position on caste discourse in their writing, Mahasweta Devi's fiction explicitly delineates the Dalits and adivasis as political, social, and psychological beings embroiled in multiple levels of oppression.
Bad kids, worse adults
If you are looking for something different from your next read—especially if you’re interested in reading a story that offers a window into another Asian culture—then Bad Kids by Zijin Chen might be a good choice. This book was an instant bestseller when it was published in China, and has since been adapted for the small screen.
Leafing through this life
This century had started 14 years ago—and unlike the previous one—the world was not drafting 19-year-olds to a great war so that they could die in the trenches.
'Small World City': A new speculative literary magazine on the horizon
The creators of Small World City believe that Dhaka’s literary community deserves better recognition and representation, both domestically and globally.
An afternoon with Abeer Hoque and Nupu Press: A celebration of creativity
The cozy atmosphere was set up by Bookworm Bangladesh, with the owner Amina Rahman kicking things off. Both Press and Hoque read out excerpts from their own books.
‘Sisters in the mirror’: Elora Shehabuddin’s response to the West’s idea of feminism
The book is especially relevant in the context of Bangalee women’s life because usually while talking about Islam and women, the West fails to take the South Asian Bangalee women into account.
Of losses and languages: reviewing Han Kang’s 'Greek Lessons'
There is a sense of inexorable catharsis, and dare I say— spirituality—when the protagonists begin their journey into one another since they alone embody the ideas and predicaments of the text.
The thing about popular and overhyped books
“Overhyped books are the empty calories of the literary world.”
