The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

In an episode of Star Book Talk aired live on Friday, July 9, author-anthropologist Tahmima Anam and DS Books Editor Sarah Anjum Bari discussed Anam’s latest novel, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021). They discuss writing tactics, feminism in literature, and Anam’s influences on the path to becoming an award-winning author.

Central to Kim Bo-Young’s winning I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2021; transl. Sophie Bowman & Sung Ryu) are duality, symmetry, and (dis)harmony. This new four-story collection is divided right down its middle—where the first and fourth stories are continuations of one another, while the second and third merge to form a tessellation of one overarching narrative. In its 314 pages is a constellation of imagined lives, imagined realities, that try and verily succeed in drawing the reader into its bizarre, brilliant, and frequently confounding orbit. Bo-Young has done well in structuring the two main stories of the book, though the hooking nature of the first forces a halt when one turns the page over to the contemplative and shape-shifting second.

A launch event titled “Longing and Belonging, a collection of narratives on 1947 partition” was held virtually on Friday, 9 July on the Facebook pages of Goethe-Institut Bangladesh and Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata. Supported by the Goethe-Institut Bangladesh as part of its Inherited Memories project, Longing and Belonging “presents a collection of chronicles, fragments, stories, morsels of reflection from Indian émigrés living in Mirpur and Mohammadpur of Dhaka who or whose families were affected by the 1947 partition”. Friday’s event featured readings, discussions, reflections, and a poetry recitation in commemoration of this project, which spanned from the autumn of 2019 through to the eased COVID-19 lockdowns of late.

Shaheen Chishti, a descendant of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, and a London-based writer and women’s rights advocate, has just released his debut novel. The Grand Daughter Project (Nimble Books, 2021) touches upon a wide range of themes including gender inequality, racial oppression, war-time trauma, and female emancipation.

The first of the two-day memorial service for publisher emeritus Mohiuddin Ahmed was held at 7 PM on July 9. Family, friends, colleagues, and notable admirers gathered virtually to pay their respects to the late, great founder of the pioneering University Press Limited.

Many of us still remember the year 1998 when Chitra Nadir Paare (Quiet Flows the Chitra) was released in Dhaka; with Afsana Mimi’s smiling face on the big posters around Dhaka University campus, the film became the talk of the town.

Yes, you have no reason to trust me: I am not your elder, I am not from your tribe;

 A hood of iron thread Drawn over face,

the first time i saw a tiger was in someone’s house all tall and lifeless; yet a tiger --

Needless to say, some of the best moments of my life have been spent inside bookstores.

Earlier this week, in a break from work-related correspondence, I sent author Tahmima Anam a personal email. I told her I was writing to her “as a reader” this time, because after months of scarfing down books for the sole purpose of writing reviews, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021) made me forget that I was reading it for work.

The book, Knowledge Management, Governance and Sustainable Development: Lessons and Insights from Developing Countries (Routledge, 2020), edited by M Aslam Alam, Fakrul Alam, and Dilara Begum, is indeed a timely endeavour.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is an Afro Latina Muslim, a hip-hop head, and the originator of the term "Muslim Cool". Through her book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion,

In Dhaka University: the Convocation Speeches, a volume compiled with an introduction by Serajul Islam Choudhury in 1988, we read that DU was established by the British as a "splendid imperial compensation" for the Muslims of East Bengal (Choudhury, 26). They had wanted the current rulers of India to make up through it for the loss they felt they had suffered because of the reunion of Bengal in 1911.

I have described this disturbance as I saw it happen, an unedifying affair, confused and inconclusive, as a symptom rather than a causative episode of the growing friction between East and West Pakistan.

DU. How those letters conjure up a sense of awe and bittersweet memory. Always in the vanguard of political, progressive movements… Language (1952), Constitution (1962), Democracy (1968/69) and Independence (1971)… but distinguished too, for its intellectual environment and academic excellence. Dacca University's endless graffiti marked corridors were a daunting place for me, a teenager and a female, in the politically momentous years of the late 1960s.

The first of July has always been a busy day. With remembrances, special anniversaries and the beginning of a new financial year, the day also reminds us of how fast time passes, as half of the year flies by at the blink of an eye. Yesterday, however, the day was extra significant, because Dhaka University turned a century old. The only known institution in Bangladesh turning 100 (to my knowledge), and that too an important one both academically and historically, led me to look for books and other published items from the past which would speak at length about the university.

One of the best ways to learn about the past 100 years of the University of Dhaka, for those proud of its history and truly concerned about its future, is to read the two volumes of Dhaka University:

“About a hundred years ago, our ancestors used to live in the Porir Desh.”

Listen to the swish of the waves. Feel the breeze whisper caresses. See the mangroves stretch