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.

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?”

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.

As an Anglophone writer in Bangladesh, I’ve frequently faced the rather inane question of why I write in English.

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.

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. 

Unlike online influencers and their various outright claims of right and wrong, Dr Wolrich’s approach is grey.

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.

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.

‘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.

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 novels are small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language. Together, they offer startling portraits of the current.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first 16 years of writer Sultana Nahar's life. "A Bomb Falls" is the 10th chapter in the book.

To understand the attitude of the adversaries of the Liberation War, I went to collect the data for this book and found that Pakistanis are defending themselves.

On summer days when the sunlight falls through the trees it scatters into a play of light and shadows on the ground. My memories of Fareed are like that.