fiction review

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Rediscovering Reading: How ‘Fragments of Riversong’ helped me heal

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Murakami and the limits of an artist’s imagination

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Shards of clarity

Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Accounts of a joyless life

Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / The apocalypse is already here

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A tale of survival, dominance, and self-discovery in colonial Bengal

Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / I love you; it’s ruining my life

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Sad men behaving badly

In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime. 

February 6, 2025
February 6, 2025

Murakami and the limits of an artist’s imagination

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its English translation published last November, plunges the reader into a kind of metaphysical vertigo that never reaches a concluding synthesis.

February 6, 2025
February 6, 2025

Rediscovering Reading: How ‘Fragments of Riversong’ helped me heal

Harvard killed my love for reading. When my advisor took me out for a celebratory dinner an hour after my doctoral defense in July 2012, I struggled to read the menu.

January 17, 2025
January 17, 2025

Accounts of a joyless life

Izumi Suzuki was little known outside of Japan during her short lifetime. The Japanese author and actress had remained a cult figure most of her life.

January 17, 2025
January 17, 2025

Shards of clarity

Beginning to read Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin, is like sitting in a silent room, alone, and a voice begins to speak as though from beside you.

January 11, 2025
January 11, 2025

The apocalypse is already here

From A Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) to The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008),

December 13, 2024
December 13, 2024

A tale of survival, dominance, and self-discovery in colonial Bengal

Obayed Haq’s Bangla novel, Arkathi, is almost a bildungsroman tale filled with adventure and self-reflection. In true bildungsroman fashion, where the protagonist progresses into adulthood with room for growth and change, a bulk of Haq’s novel talks about the spiritual journey that an orphan, Naren, takes through a forest in order to mature, and comes out on the other side to realise a community’s deep, hidden truth.

December 5, 2024
December 5, 2024

I love you; it’s ruining my life

Someone in a chat group somewhere called Sally Rooney the ‘Taylor Swift’ of the literary world, and now I cannot unsee it.

November 7, 2024
November 7, 2024

Sad men behaving badly

In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime. 

October 31, 2024
October 31, 2024
October 24, 2024
October 24, 2024

A tale of forgetting and remembrance

Being an ardent admirer of K-pop culture, I wonder why I was hitherto unaware of this gem of a book, One Left by Kim Soom, and the excruciatingly painful truth it delineates.