At the beginning of “A Day Eight Years Ago” (originally published in 1954) by Jibananda Das, we learn that a man has been taken to the morgue.

Though his characters breathe through very human emotions, yearning, hesitation, separation, regret, Tagore lifts love gently away from the limits of the human hand. It becomes something inwardly vast, where feeling matters more than outcome, and presence matters more than possession. This is why his lovers often come close, yet never arrive.

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

Bengali literature had already seen its fair share of tall-tale storytellers—most notably Ghana Da by Premendra Mitra and Tenny Da by Narayan Gangopadhyay. Tarinicharan Banerjee, or Tarini Khuro, is not entirely different in essence. He lives in Beniatola Lane and walks to Ballygunge to narrate his stories to a group of eager listeners—among them Poltu, the narrator, and Napla, a slightly rebellious boy who delights in interrupting him. As I read those stories late into the night, I found myself, willingly or not, becoming the sixth member of their circle.

It always felt like modernity flatters itself with a simple story: history moves from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from inherited authority to critique.

It sounds flippant to put it that way but, the Aeneid, at its core, really is a continuation fic—picking up where Homer’s Trojan War ended and following Aeneas, a minor character in the canon, as he stumbles through an entirely new narrative along with original characters and incredibly expanded lore.

But it goes without saying that Rabindranath, as the most famous member of the Tagore family and one of the cornerstones of Bengali culture, is thoroughly intertwined with the most significant day of the Bengali calendar. His thoughts on PohelaBaishakh are complex and evolved over the years, alongside his own development as an artist and the changing societal circumstances, as can be seen through his three essays on this day.

Romance has never existed apart from inequality. The genre depends on distance—on obstacles that make love feel hard-won.

Earlier this year, Brandon Sanderson finalised what has been described as an “unprecedented deal” with Apple TV+ to adapt his Cosmere universe for film and television, specifically his Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive series. For years, Hollywood had shown interest in acquiring the rights to his massive fantasy catalogue. But they could not guarantee him creative control. This is the biggest reason Sanderson had not sold the rights until now. With this Apple TV+ deal, Sanderson gets full creative power and will oversee each project personally.

Existentialism is a philosophical theory and a literary perspective. Its central proposition is that the world has no a priori meaning or purpose.

In classical studies of sensory experiences, philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggest that bodily sensations constitute our lived reality.

I’ve always been fascinated by what stories can tell us about the inner lives (what men like to call the private sphere) of women throughout history.

Few genres are as unapologetically optimistic as romance. At its core lies the Happily Ever After (HEA), a convention so fundamental that it often stands in for the genre itself.

Just as Bengali women played an important role in the Liberation War, they also played a fearless role in the movement for the Bangla language before it, participating alongside men as fellow warriors.

In addition to today’s transnational corporations and the global explosion of their advertisements, the works of William Shakespeare and Karl Marx keep teaching us a great deal about the relationship between money and language.

For years, speculative dystopian fiction has trained readers to expect the worst: scorched planets, collapsing governments, ruthless technologies, and futures where survival is the only victory left. Solarpunk pushes back against that narrative. Instead of asking how the world ends, it asks a far more radical question: what if we fix it? What if cities worked with nature instead of against it? What if technology served communities, not corporations? And what if hope wasn’t naive, but necessary?

Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Bangla poem “Bidrohi” (first published in January 1922), in Bijli magazine during British colonial rule, is more than just anti-imperialist literature—it is a striking philosophical rendition.

In a wilting summer swelter of 1797 in London, a name was born twice–mother Mary Wollstonecraft wound the clock of daughter Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin)’s life, for the very first time.

Fiction has long chronicled that women have always worked more than what is counted, felt more than what is acknowledged, and lost more than what anyone will ever quantify.

If the girls we read about could speak today, their voices would be both sharp and unflinching.