Indigenous women are read even less. There are multiple root causes–lack of editorial support for indigenous authors writing in their mother tongues, the predominance of oral traditions, gender inequality and bias.

I spent the whole day running on the roads near Ramna park. Riding a bicycle alone through the narrow alleys of Mohammadpur without the fear of anyone jumping out at me from the corners.

I hurt my left knee quite seriously but was too afraid of my father to tell anyone about it. I thought the fault was mine, as though my injury was some kind of crime. So for several days I wore long dresses and kept my knee hidden from everyone even as the wound became infected and the bone began to show.

In celebration of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, born on this day, March 6, 1927.

Soundless on my flaking wall, you/ rest like a sniper in frigid fear,

You do not read Plath,/ Nor Milton./ Or Wordsworth./ Or Shakespeare. What do you read?/ Newspapers, current affairs,/ How to be great when you're good.

A daughter reflects on time and Bengali culture as she revels in the excitement of cooking her parents a meal.

Hasan Hafizur Rahman's 'Ekushey February' created huge turmoil and faced police persecution.

Professor Islam sheds light on English writing in Bangladesh, its future, and the influence of the language movement on the Bangladeshi psyche.

Language trickles down the routes that blood took through Time. They say it’s a linear path, and yet I, a reluctant servant to the wiles of Time, find myself laid out in loops and slopes.

'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first sixteen years of Sultana Nahar's life. "Mercolized Wax" is the second chapter in the book.

Come, if you may, with swords or guns. Remember, I won’t cry and run; I will rise from the depths of the land.

She wakes up suddenly from her unnatural beeline posture, slowly and ever so gently, like a chained demon would after just hours of calculated slumber. I never look.

There's something more to it that trammeled his existence, and he wanted to escape the suffocation.

All of it–the material right for my level, the books a bit too adult for me at the time, the texts where I could only guess at the brilliance but would have to shelve until I could revisit them a couple of decades later for better comprehension–all of it has led me to become myself: For better or for worse. 

I was nine years of age the first time I set eyes on a Dhaka street. I received my first welcome from a group of beggars tapping on my car window.

It was a time in the night where one can’t really tell if it’s night or eve. The sun is still sleeping in and it’s unlikely that it has any other plans anytime soon. Nothing but silence cloaks the wood and it is the time for the chatter of the owls and bats.

When I think of the thick limestone walls of the house now I think of the essence of the generations of our family that it has absorbed.

Depiction of such problematic forms of ‘romance’ and relationships surely distort the judgement of readers regarding love and romance.

Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.