Books
BOOK REVIEW: POETRY AND NONFICTION / Poetry for our times and a poet’s new frontier
Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures.
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / The saga of a mother’s sacrifice and resilience
Anisul Hoque’s Kokhono Amar Maa-ke is the story of appalling sacrifices made by a mother and her unwavering determination to secure a bright future for her children.
Alice Munro, Canadian Nobel Prize-winning author, dies at 92
Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose exquisitely crafted tales of the loves, ambitions and travails of small-town women in her native land made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, has died at the age of 92, her publisher said on Tuesday
INTERVIEW / A perfect cup of literary ‘saa’
Priyanka Taslim greets me with a gentle smile as we meet over Zoom. She is eloquent and our conversation flows organically, akin to an adda over a cup of saa (cha).
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Should this lost novel have been found?
Articles on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last novel to be published by his sons against the author’s wishes built up my anticipation and I couldn’t wait for April to arrive. Thanks to Bookworm, I got my copy the moment they had it in store and I read it twice. It didn’t impress me the first time as it was just a string of chapters describing how a promiscuous woman drove herself into the arms of different men on her annual August 16 visits to a Caribbean island.
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / A peripatetic poet’s pleasing musings
The title of this book suggests that it is based in Bengal but it really meanders deftly across time and space, more often than not in “mazy motion”.
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A mesmerising journey of life’s twists and turn
The Covenant of Water by physician and author Abraham Verghese tells the story of three generations of an Orthodox Saint Thomas Christian family in Kerala. Through suffering and loss, triumphs and victories, the importance of familial ties is examined and supported. In the Kerala of the 1940s, blood ties were sacred, but “family” also meant helpers who worked for you. Members of the three-generational family seem to be under a curse which causes its members to drown in water. The mystical power of water in our lives is explored with precision and sensitivity in the novel.
REFLECTIONS / The first American months
The sun was up. The sky was a perfect cerulean blue, the neighbourhood blissfully quiet. Through my window, I relished the sunny first day of 2020, with a cup of tea in my hand.
A list of life lessons
Set in 1979, this is a story of monsters—the ones who prey on the vulnerable, the ones that exploit our weaknesses, and the ones that we elevate to positions of power.
Be a tree
Be a tree Get wet in sorrow’s shower and you’ll recover. From envy’s scorching sun gather strength
There’s no way you’ll outrun a bear
Smoother violence fills our hearts like charming splinters. The irony is I am the first of my women
The loss of essentiality
Umar stood in line with all the patience in the world. He could smell the anxiety and fear in the air. The room was filled with people once glorifying death and taking pride in solitude, now filled with panic in the face of reality.
New Garcia Marquez novel launched 10 years after his death
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died a decade ago, but a previously unpublished book by the author who popularised the Latin American "magical realism" narrative genre will hit the stores on Wednesday, somewhat despite his wishes
5 mystery thriller books to look out for at and after Boi Mela
Sanjana has killed her husband. She had not meant to kill him, but the odds never seem to be in her favour. Desperately trying to grasp the reality of her situation, she flees the crime scene, leaving her family, friends and life behind.
The promises and pitfalls of decolonial thinking
The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore.
The stories that nonfictions tell
Dense textbooks with words more twisted than the shapes my lips could contort themselves into—for the longest time, my perception of non-fiction didn’t deviate from this singular image.
A twisted tale of deception
Reading this book was uncomfortable, like a car crash waiting to happen, it was hard to read and even harder to put down.
The enchanting realism in Shahaduz Zaman’s ‘The Mynah Bird’s Testimony’
Shahaduz Zaman is a familiar face in Bangladeshi literature, whose literary career spans decades of fruitful work. He regularly writes columns for Bangla newspapers, has written a few notable biographical fiction, such as Ekjon Komolalebu (Prothoma, 2017), based around the life of Jibanananda Das, and has garnered some duly needed appreciation for ethnographic work on the history of medicine during the liberation war.
