fiction
FICTION / Hair cream
The mosque committee was quite displeased with Rashed, their young muezzin.
INTERVIEW / A perfect cup of literary ‘saa’
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).
FICTION / Insomnia
You are wide awake again
FICTION / The man who dug his own grave
Everyone gathered around the east end of the Shashipur to watch Sharafat Miah dig his own grave. The local kids lurked around Sharafat’s old hut, keeping a watch on the progress of the grave until their mothers came to pick them up after Maghrib.
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in your House
If they knew, your mother would have said, “It’s in your head, darling,” and your father would have screamed, “Put that head in the toilet bowl where it belongs.”
THE SHELF / 6 Books to add to your summer reading list
As summer rolls around and our lifestyle changes to adjust to the heat, so do a lot of our books! So here are a few books that might make a good addition to this year’s summer reading list.
ESSAY / ‘The day begins wrong’: Mastering tension and suspense in fiction
In my creative writing classes, whether at the University of Toronto or the Hermitage Residency in Bangladesh, I emphasise that any student of fiction must first master suspense
FICTION / The chasm
At around 2 AM he was awoken by the sound of Shahidun’s sniveling cries on her prayer mat. As grating as it might have sounded, he felt grateful for it to have woken him up.
THE SHELF / 5 short books you can read and finish on Eid day
Here is a list of 5 short and swift books for fellow bookworms (people who would much rather stay in than socialise) to nestle in with on this Eid day.
Tucked between moving trains and elegiac dead-ends
Some among us might have wondered what it feels like to hold a lit bomb between our palms. One that will go off inevitably yet its spark, heat, force, weight, and pulsating nature are so fascinating that we are unable to put it down or look away, all the while knowing at the end of the wick we too will be destroyed—a chosen death, a voluntary annihilation.
A Solo Exhibition
Never in his wildest imaginations had Aniket thought that everything would come together so well. Nearly everyone he invited had come.
The Melancholic Man
The whole courtroom held their breath, waiting to hear Nizam's answer. As he nodded in affirmation, the enraged audience got off their seats to beat up the accused.
Chess Grandmaster
My father reasoned that he had grown up in a poor land that had been plundered by the colonial powers and he was not going to give away another national treasure
Wings Across A City Wall
Shimu and Tushar had grown up together on an alley in the Mirpur area of Dhaka city. Their neighbouring houses were separated only by a brick wall, about two meters high. The branches of a tree growing beside Tushar’s house overhung the wall, its foliage shading a part of Shimu’s courtyard.
White-eyed Corpse
The beast bellowed below Mushfiq’s bedroom window, propelling rushes of tingles within him. He smiled.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian renovations
Jhumpa Lahiri has always been the rare author whose prowess in the art of the short-story far surpassed her novelistic talents.
2023 in Review
Some of these works have inspected the complex lives of modern Bangalis while some have traced the contours of our past often not examined. Here’s your chance to read some of the releases of this year by Bangladeshi authors, if you haven’t read them yet.
Payback time
I’m not sure when I first realised that we’d met before. In the beginning, you were just the elderly man I often noticed pottering around our communal rooftop.
Her last words
The slamming of the front door sounded an ominous note, warning of trouble to come.
