nonfiction
Book Review: Nonfiction / ‘Shohoj Kothai Orthoniti’ A localised flavour of economics
Flipping the pages of a textbook often makes me feel like I’m trapped in the US. We studied economics from an American lens, using American textbooks,
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / ‘History and Heritage’: Reading Bengal in a series
Even at this moment when Google is under threat of being taken over by Artificial Intelligence and you may search for anything online,
CREATIVE NONFICTION / Homeward
When I was born, my skin was dark, like my grandfather’s, in whose arms I discovered my first home. Relatives old and new, whose disappointment was being nursed by my parents’ fair complexions, looked from afar as my rotund cheeks melted into the sleeves of my dada’s discolored half-sleeve shirt.
Essay / War still rages on
We might never know how it feels when your whole existence is denied or the loss of homeland, but we can get a little glimpse of their suffering.
CREATIVE NONFICTION / Of love, longing, and music that make us
My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.
MUSINGS / The sound of Dhaka city
Once on a particularly smothering hot day, on a CNG ride to work, I was stuck in the most heinous traffic for over two hours. Over the yelling drivers, honking cars, and incessant cursing over why the CNGs were trying to overtake the expensive cars, I was listening to my usual cycle of songs. As coincidence would have it, David Gilmour in his seraphic voice posed the question: “So, so you think you can tell/ Heaven from hell?”
OPINION / What you call your own
As an Anglophone writer in Bangladesh, I’ve frequently faced the rather inane question of why I write in English.
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / A modern love story in translation
I became an ardent admirer of Amrita Pritam, the maverick Punjabi author, an outspoken critic of the Indian patriarchy and discriminating social practices, three decades back in New York when I was putting together an anthology of world feminist poems in Bangla translation.
Book review: Nonfiction / The records of resilience
Much of the reminiscences in The Murti Boys encompass the grittiness of staving off the Pakistanis with little weaponry and a great deal of quick thinking.
The new speculative literary magazine on the block
Veering off from stories for a bit, Fahim Anzoom Rumman’s “The Secret” was a breath of fresh air. The piece seemed to be a cross between a poem and the kind of fable your grandparents would tell you as a kid to get you to fall asleep.
Mood mirror
Whenever depression is depicted in pop culture, it is shown in some visible extreme, with blue-grey lighting, dark rooms, ashen faces peering out through rainy windows, bodies curled up in bed.
6 wonderful books to celebrate the Women in Translation month
‘Women in Translation’ is an all-inclusive, international project that aims to terminate the continual discrimination faced by non-English female authors, and gives them due recognition.
Why I learned more from reading fiction books than nonfiction
It is deeply saddening that this discouragement to read fiction is coming at a time when we as a population are suffering from a crisis in empathy.
The "original and thrilling": The Booker Prizes announces 2023 longlist
The novels are small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language. Together, they offer startling portraits of the current.
Tech bias: not a glitch, but a structural problem
With statistics backing her up, Broussard does a stellar job of portraying this bias for the readers with stories from individuals who have faced such discrimination. The book opens with the story of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams who gets wrongfully identified by a police facial recognition technology and gets taken into custody.
An odyssey of love and loss
Having read an account of someone who stood by her husband and helped him through an assisted suicide out of love was extremely heart-wrenching.
The bitter-sweet world of self-help books
The concept of self-improvement is by no means a new one, rather the notion is in the foundational structures of moral well-being. The centuries old Socrates commandment, “Know Thyself” is at the very crux of what self-improvement consists of.
‘Sisters in the mirror’: Elora Shehabuddin’s response to the West’s idea of feminism
The book is especially relevant in the context of Bangalee women’s life because usually while talking about Islam and women, the West fails to take the South Asian Bangalee women into account.
The pirates of Madagascar
In this posthumous effort, 'Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Graeber posits, in characteristic fashion, that the Enlightenment would not have happened if not for the pirates around the Malagasy coast.
