Star Literature
ESSAY / Zadie Smith’s rhetorical tricks
Smith’s framing runs into the same blind spot in other criticisms levelled at student protests, i.e. it detaches the student’s cause from the activists, academics, and journalists, Palestinian or otherwise, who have been documenting Israel’s settler colonial project for 75 years.
Fiction / Hair cream
The mosque committee was quite displeased with Rashed, their young muezzin.
A childhood memory
Dust patterns have gathered around my landline phone, huddling around the maroon. my fingerprints take some dust off of it, and they rejoice.
Poetry / How to exist
When there’s a lull in the air, I get the feeling that I’ve scraped the bottom of my fleshy insides.
ESSAY / Rabindranath Tagore’s engagement with Islamic culture and Muslims
The English poet W.B. Yeats once expressed his profound admiration for Rabindranath Tagore, describing him as “someone greater than any of us”.
POETRY / Shedin dujone dulachinu bone
You know how that day the wind brought out/ The crazy thoughts I had in me all the while.
POETRY / Je chilo amar shopnocharini
You called me close in the moments of grace/ Veiling my delicate senses
POETRY / A building, a tree, and a kid
Buckets of water I pour on my head; my vision gets blurry./ "The blurrier, the merrier", my mother said.
REFLECTIONS / Human passions in Kurosawa’s Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s enduring international appeal is in part due to the remarkable personalities he had invented.
FICTION / The man who dug his own grave
Everyone gathered around the east end of the Shashipur to watch Sharafat Miah dig his own grave. The local kids lurked around Sharafat’s old hut, keeping a watch on the progress of the grave until their mothers came to pick them up after Maghrib.
Cyan is my name when I talk about you
I'm tired of living with this nagging thought that we'll cross paths someday, /You and I
The Precious O
That split second when the rubber slaps your skin and stays, when there is a click of a switch, a levitation, a lightness of your body—everyone remembers the first time they are knocked out, everyone except Mr Suleyman Khar, regional light-heavyweight titleist,
A house a bit bigger on the inside
Playing with a location that seems real but is not is a tricky line to negotiate, and writer beware: you will be attacked
The chasm
At around 2 AM he was awoken by the sound of Shahidun’s sniveling cries on her prayer mat. As grating as it might have sounded, he felt grateful for it to have woken him up.
'Cube': Sehri Tales selections, Day 30
The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 30 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Cube.
'Call': Sehri Tales selections, Day 29
The top selections in poetry, flash fiction and artwork for Day 29 of the Sehri Tales challenge; prompt: Call
