Poetry for our times and a poet’s new frontier
Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures.
3d ago
Shedin dujone dulachinu bone
You know how that day the wind brought out/ The crazy thoughts I had in me all the while.
1w ago
A peripatetic poet’s pleasing musings
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”.
1m ago
Be a tree
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
2m ago
Rehman Sobhan’s recollections of the road he took towards December 16, 1971
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.
3m ago
18th century British women writers and their Indian others
The postcolonial and feminist lenses Chatterjee deploys in his discussion of the works of the selected women writers seem to suit his analysis of the works of these "enlightenment" period British women writers, for their biases, fixations, and anxieties often come into view then.
4m ago
January 9, 2021
A Bangladeshi Babu Like No Other
Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh is a tour de force of a novel. Exuberant, extravagant, learned, zany, ingenious, whimsical, irreverent and provocative, this is a work of amazing merit.
August 15, 2020
Poetry of Nirmalendu Goon
How Freedom Became Our Own Word
July 1, 2020
The road to DU’s opening day
In these pandemic-plagued times, ceremonies commemorating the beginning of the celebrations of the University of Dhaka (or DU) that were to culminate in July 1, 2021 have been scaled down drastically; the chances of alumni and well-wishers of university students and faculty members thronging the campus on July 1, 2020 to inaugurate the year-long events have all but gone.
May 18, 2020
Rest in Peace, Dear Aniusuzzaman Sir
It was probably on a day in the second week of March that I last saw and heard professor Anisuzzaman—our Anisuzzaman sir—speak publicly.
May 9, 2020
Friends Forever in a Happening Place!
There were six of us, bosom buddies who had studied together in the same school and college, friends for years—“good” boys. And there were the same number of them, if not more, from the same Dhaka school and college—“nice” girls.
April 25, 2020
London’s 17th-century plague and our global pandemic
Art has always been both a mirror of and a balm for human experience through disaster. In this short series, an author of Daily Star Books—our book publishing imprint—will periodically explore a facet of this link between literature and our ongoing battle with Covid-19.
March 26, 2020
Bangabandhu’s Vision of Independence
One of the most striking characteristics evident in The Unfinished Memoirs is how the young Sheikh Mujibur Rahman showed
March 14, 2020
Bangabandhu, the 1947 Partition and Healing its Wounds
In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.
January 18, 2020
SMI—a Tribute!
To think of Syed Manzoorul Islam—Manzoor bhai to me (but let me call him SMI in the rest of this piece!) —is to think of someone always in motion, whether in the everyday world we inhabit, or the life of the mind that he lives so intensely.
September 14, 2019
From Liberation War Hero to Prison and After: A Sobering Tale
Two narratives counterpoint each other in Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury’s Chariot of Life: Liberation War, Politics and Sojourn in Jail. The first is the absorbing story of major events in the author’s life till the closing years of the first decade of this century. The second is
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