Bot Book Reviews

Bot Book Reviews

ESSAY / Between tradition and taboo: The arranged marriage trope in Bangla dark romance literature

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not endorse or condone any form of abuse or exploitation.

2m ago

EVENT REPORT / Celebrating diversity and language at “Bhasha Utshob 2025”

Gulshan Society held a two-day language festival at the Gulshan Lake Park, curated by Sadaf Saaz and Jatrik. The event took place over the weekend of 21-22 February that saw discussion panels, original musical performances, and poetry recitations, surrounded by an array of book stalls and food courts.

2m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Rediscovering Reading: How ‘Fragments of Riversong’ helped me heal

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

3m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Murakami and the limits of an artist’s imagination

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

3m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Shards of clarity

Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.

4m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Accounts of a joyless life

Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.

4m ago

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Through folklore and fantasy: An ode to Bangla mythological characters

The book invites you to revel in the world of legends, to dream as you once did as a child.

4m ago

EVENT REPORT / ‘Catfish and Avatars’: Discussions on cyber lives and cyber safety

The phrases “cyber safety” and “cyber lives” may seem vague and not very well understood among Bangladesh’s netizens.

5m ago

The legacy of blood

Henry Kissinger is infamous in Bangladesh for allegedly terming the newly-independent country a “bottomless basket”, but this statement appears to be the least of his crimes against the people of Bangladesh.

3y ago

The universality of solitude and good books in Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Whereabouts'

Whereabouts (Penguin India, 2021) is Jhumpa Lahiri’s third novel, published originally as Dove mi trovo (2018) in Italian and translated to English by the author herself, as she did with her work of nonfiction, In Other Words (2015).

3y ago

Join our reading challenge with Bookcentric!

Daily Star Books is excited to be teaming up with Dhaka’s Bookcentric library for their monthly reading challenge, which encourages readers to read books following each month’s theme and write their own book reviews. Starting from August, reader reviews stand a chance to be published online on The Daily Star.

3y ago

‘Wendy, Master of Art’: The life of the artist in graduate school

No one said earning a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) would be easy. After all, art is anything but a linear process of creation. It zigzags through tumultuous periods of unease, delicate uncertainties, and perpetual anxieties, along with quite a mouthful of self-induced negativity.

3y ago

'Your Heart, My Sky': A timely YA novel-in-verse about the 1990s Cuban “Special Period”

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.

3y ago

'The Last Queen' by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A fierce queen overlooked by the history books

Little has been written about Maharani Jindan Kaur, the youngest and last queen of the Sikh empire. Born as the humble daughter of the royal kennel keeper, Jindan saw a life of massive upheaval, living as the youngest queen to a regent and then ultimately a rebel and an exile.

3y ago

Chinmay Tumbe's 'The Age of Pandemics': Lessons from history in desperate times

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.

3y ago

'Golden: Bangladesh at 50' - A tender, discerning look at where we are now

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.

3y ago

2021’s Commonwealth Prize-winning story makes human the unsavoury segments of life

On June 30, a virtual ceremony for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize was held, and for the first time in its history a Sri Lankan writer was announced as the overall winner.

3y ago

Mohiuddin Ahmed and the industry he pioneered

The loss dealt to Bangladesh and its publishing industry this week will be unparalleled—at 12:59 am on Tuesday, June 22, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Emeritus Publisher and founder of University Press Limited (UPL), passed away after surviving Parkinson’s disease for 20 years.

3y ago