Sabrina Fatma Ahmad

‘Fit for the Gods: Greek Mythology Reimagined’ (Vintage, 2023), edited by Jenn Northington and S. Zainab Williams, is a collection of classic myths with a twist

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime. 

The mid-month slump is probably the most demoralising part of the Sehri Tales challenge, even for long-time Talers.

I love reading about popular inventions which were originally created with a different purpose in mind. For instance, did you know that bubble wrap, that oh-so-ubiquitous packing material that doubles as a stress-relieving toy, was initially intended to be wallpaper? Imagine that! On the one hand, you have hours and hours of bubble-popping fun. On the other hand, probably a trypophobe’s nightmare, so maybe not. Either way, March Chavannes and Alfred Fielding, the co-inventors of the material, thought they had a dud on their hands until IBM started looking for better packing materials for their delicate new computers. The rest is history.

I remember the Ramadan of 2020, which was the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and also the year my friends and I decided to shift the Sehri Tales to our own platform and open it up to a wider audience.

Originally from Massachusetts, international development consultant Elizabeth Shick was living with her family in Yangon, Myanmar from 2013-2019 and got to witness not just Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy win the 2015 elections by a landslide, but the military crackdown on Rakhine state that led to the Rohingya exodus into Bangladesh in 2017.