“Agunmukha” translates to “fire-mouth” in English. The word mirrors the tumultuous life of Noorjahan Bose, shaped by her early years in cyclone- and flood-prone small towns of Barisal; her experience of sexual violence at the age of 10; the loss of Imamuddin, her first love and husband, to smallpox; single motherhood; and her later marriage to Swadesh Bose, a Hindu man—an interfaith union opposed by society.

Twelve Churches succeeds in its ambitious goal of revealing Christianity's global complexity through architecture and human stories, embracing the deepest contested contradictions that add to the pageantry of religious faith in the modern world.

As we commemorate Begum Rokeya Day, Oborodh Bashini stands not as a relic of a bygone era but as a living blueprint for modern resistance. The stories she told are specific to a time, but the structures of silencing they represent are hauntingly familiar.

The author of this book is the protagonist of a charming inter-cultural romance. He is one of fewer than a handful of living Westerners who fortuitously fell in love with Bengali literature and made a distinguished career of teaching it—at the University of Chicago in his case.

Buried beneath masses of mangled bodies of countless innocents slowly pulled from the shrapnel and debris, their remaining flesh torn in the extraction, lies a reflection of the world’s inhumanity.

Kumu was born five years after Peara. Five long, whisper-filled years. Peara, the third child, the first son, the long-awaited heir who arrived with the weight of joy and expectation.

Ogilvie reveals that the method of its construction: a global appeal for words from any and all English speakers, ensured that the language of the periphery flooded the metropole.

Written in deep striking prose, Saramandi lends her authorial voice to the changing dynamics of her life whose future is described as  “a line that turned out to be a loop” similar to the fate of her homeland.

The book examines the context and circumstances that spurred these six central figures to devise or promote the solutions they did

This is not a book review. At least not in the traditional sense where the reviewer recaps the gist of a book, quoting and analyzing parts, drawing or pointing to conclusions.

One of the memoir’s most striking elements is Westover’s refusal to paint her family in simple black and white

I was born too late for CBGB’s, too offline for MySpace and too far away from dive bars. I came to all of it two entire decades late so The Strokes wasn’t exactly the soundtrack to my reckless twenties but a band I happened to stumble into during a mid-pandemic spiral.

Review of ‘Jodi Lokkho Thake Otut: Shafolyer Khola Koushol’ (Anyaprokash, 2025) by Asif Iqbal

Review of ‘The Last Bench’ (Ekadā, 2025) by Adhir Biswas

Mowtushi Mahruba’s Africa in the Bengali Imagination: from Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-73 is a distinctive and pioneering work on the way the continent led to creative writing in English as well as Bengali over the decades

When I picked up Baitullah Quaderee’s 'Bangladesher Shater Dashaker Kabita', it wasn’t particularly out of scholarly curiosity. The book is, by design, a doctoral thesis—its structure conventional, its chapters arranged by academic demand—but what caught my interest was not the format, nor even the topic. It was the author himself. 

Review of ‘Reframing My Worth: Memoir of a Bangladeshi-Canadian Woman’ by Habiba Zaman (FriesenPress, 2024)

In the contested notion of creating a ‘nation,’ few ideas provoke as much ire among the everyday citizens of a bordered entity as the concept of a space—one that carries with it the weight of instilling an identity.

Bangladesh has suffered the terrible luck of having to deal with authoritarianism several times since its inception, most recently under the Awami League from 2009 to 2024.

Every December, my reading group chooses a book related to 1971. In 2015, for example, we read A. Qayyum Khan’s Bittersweet Victory: A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (2013) and a few years earlier we read Siddik Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Oxford University Press, 1977).