A Good Find
Rashida Sultana is a short story writer and frequent contributor to the literature pages of Bengali dailies and little magazines. She is also an accomplished poet of ordinary life, infusing small moments with a heightened colour and clarity that underlines a quietly dissident feminine voice. Rashida has previously published two volumes of short stories, on the themes of loneliness, domestic discord and lovelorn lives of the Bengali middle and lower middle class, a social segment whose profiles she draws with a swift sureness. In her latest collection of short stories aimed at the Ekushey boi mela, Porolaalneel, she displays that same sharp eye and ear for their bedrooms and speech, but her convictions about society's victims, its transients, seem to have become stronger, and more emphatic. For readers whose tastes run along such lines, she is a good find, and even better read.
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