Climate change and food security issues are multifaceted and transcend national boundaries.

Two years ago, I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Christmas Tree and the Wedding”(1848), and even though I don’t celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense,

When the Mango Tree Blossomed is a voluminous compilation of, as the book’s subtitle proclaims, fifty short stories from Bangladesh, edited by Niaz Zaman.

For anyone with academic or amateurish interest in Bangladeshi writings in English this must be a long-awaited book. The publication of Mohammad A Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan–edited Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (July 2021), possibly the first-ever of its kind, thus came as a welcome piece of news, and I congratulate the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh on publishing it in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, this three-hundred-page useful collection with befitting hardcover and flawless compose.

Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is the third work on the subject by an Indian writer that I have come across in recent years, but it is truly sui generis.

Storytelling is a space in which, as writers and readers, we experience the ways of how we know the world and interact with it.

Rachel Clarke reminds us of the intensity of the ongoing tragedy in her autobiographical Breathtaking (Little, Brown, 2021), told from the extraordinary perspective of a palliative care doctor.

Iraq once boasted one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, encompassing 2,600 years of rich cultural history punctuated with moments of benign tolerance, blatant discrimination, and outright intolerance and persecution.

Shaheen Chishti, a descendant of the revered Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, and a London-based writer and women’s rights advocate, has just released his debut novel. The Grand Daughter Project (Nimble Books, 2021) touches upon a wide range of themes including gender inequality, racial oppression, war-time trauma, and female emancipation.

The book, Knowledge Management, Governance and Sustainable Development: Lessons and Insights from Developing Countries (Routledge, 2020), edited by M Aslam Alam, Fakrul Alam, and Dilara Begum, is indeed a timely endeavour.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is an Afro Latina Muslim, a hip-hop head, and the originator of the term "Muslim Cool". Through her book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion,

Earlier this week, in a break from work-related correspondence, I sent author Tahmima Anam a personal email. I told her I was writing to her “as a reader” this time, because after months of scarfing down books for the sole purpose of writing reviews, The Startup Wife (Penguin India, 2021) made me forget that I was reading it for work.

One of the best ways to learn about the past 100 years of the University of Dhaka, for those proud of its history and truly concerned about its future, is to read the two volumes of Dhaka University:

Today I would like to talk about a book that I have been waiting to read for a very long time. After years of procrastination, luckily, I finally got hold of a copy and decided to write my thoughts about it—what I expect from it, why I would like to read it and of course, experiencing the sheer eagerness of waiting to turn the pages of a new book; a new adventure.

Mrittika Anan Rahman (MAR): What does it say about Bollywood that it became mediators of so many of India and Bangladesh’s neighbouring cultures through its adaptation of stories such as Mughal-E-Azam, Umrao Jaan, or Laila Majnu?

In a detour from all the genres and topics that we review on this page, this monthly column on short stories is a little treat to ourselves—a short and delicious reminder of what the simple act of storytelling can accomplish.

When I began reading Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown and Company, 2020), all I knew about it was that it was a memoir; an account of the life of the author, Ayad Akhtar—a second-generation Muslim immigrant with Pakistani parents who migrated to America to further their careers as doctors.

Female empowerment is often seen as a luxury reserved for privileged societies—something no struggling community can think about. After all, we misapprehended women’s empowerment as an issue exclusively for women. Yet by making this mistake, struggling communities continue trying to climb out of poverty whilst carrying the deadweight of wasted potential—disenfranchised women.

Even though we moved out of our grandmother’s house in Dhaka more than a decade ago, my sister and I still associate the word “storm” with the smell of the unripe mangoes that the kalboishakhi would force down from the trees in her backyard. There are many other quirks we share, things that might seem insignificant to someone who was not a part of our lives back then. But to us, the house with its long corridors and leafy backyard, and a front yard that turned into a badminton court each winter, is nothing short of a wonderland, a place that nurtured us even as it introduced us to the harsher realities of life, a place that remains a living, breathing character in the many dreams and nightmares that we have.

Sufia Kamal’s is a name revered in nearly every household in the country, and not just because of the spontaneous literary genius that she possessed. She was simultaneously a poet, a feminist activist, and a cultural icon; all of these identities were in some way or other reflected in her literary works—comprising short stories, plays, novels, travelogues, and autobiography—which took her closer to touching the lives of a broader spectrum of people across the country.