Priyanka Taslim greets me with a gentle smile as we meet over Zoom. She is eloquent and our conversation flows organically, akin to an adda over a cup of saa (cha).
To commemorate the birth anniversary of Satyajit Ray, consider reading Ekei Bole Shooting (1979), a personal narrative chronicling the auteur’s making of his movie masterpiece Pather Panchali (1955).
Set to begin after V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series, this book catapults us back into a world full of magic, now introducing us to new characters and another adventure packed plot.
Articles on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last novel to be published by his sons against the author’s wishes built up my anticipation and I couldn’t wait for April to arrive. Thanks to Bookworm, I got my copy the moment they had it in store and I read it twice. It didn’t impress me the first time as it was just a string of chapters describing how a promiscuous woman drove herself into the arms of different men on her annual August 16 visits to a Caribbean island.
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
The Covenant of Water by physician and author Abraham Verghese tells the story of three generations of an Orthodox Saint Thomas Christian family in Kerala. Through suffering and loss, triumphs and victories, the importance of familial ties is examined and supported. In the Kerala of the 1940s, blood ties were sacred, but “family” also meant helpers who worked for you. Members of the three-generational family seem to be under a curse which causes its members to drown in water. The mystical power of water in our lives is explored with precision and sensitivity in the novel.
The sun was up. The sky was a perfect cerulean blue, the neighbourhood blissfully quiet. Through my window, I relished the sunny first day of 2020, with a cup of tea in my hand.
Set in 1979, this is a story of monsters—the ones who prey on the vulnerable, the ones that exploit our weaknesses, and the ones that we elevate to positions of power.
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
Smoother violence fills our hearts like charming splinters. The irony is I am the first of my women
Umar stood in line with all the patience in the world. He could smell the anxiety and fear in the air. The room was filled with people once glorifying death and taking pride in solitude, now filled with panic in the face of reality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died a decade ago, but a previously unpublished book by the author who popularised the Latin American "magical realism" narrative genre will hit the stores on Wednesday, somewhat despite his wishes
Sanjana has killed her husband. She had not meant to kill him, but the odds never seem to be in her favour. Desperately trying to grasp the reality of her situation, she flees the crime scene, leaving her family, friends and life behind.
The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore.
Dense textbooks with words more twisted than the shapes my lips could contort themselves into—for the longest time, my perception of non-fiction didn’t deviate from this singular image.
Reading this book was uncomfortable, like a car crash waiting to happen, it was hard to read and even harder to put down.
Shahaduz Zaman is a familiar face in Bangladeshi literature, whose literary career spans decades of fruitful work. He regularly writes columns for Bangla newspapers, has written a few notable biographical fiction, such as Ekjon Komolalebu (Prothoma, 2017), based around the life of Jibanananda Das, and has garnered some duly needed appreciation for ethnographic work on the history of medicine during the liberation war.
The title of the first of Professor Rehman Sobhan’s two-part memoir suggests that it is about his “years of fulfilment”; the subject matter of its sequel therefore would be about the “untranquil” years that followed.