Book Reviews | The Daily Star

  • Ottegsahon: Caress Of The Muse

    The adage goes that almost every Bengali is born with poetry in his/her heart. Note the word - almost! There exists, blissfully, exceptions to this byword. Happily,

  • Kaiser Haq Presents Shaheed Quaderi to the Anglophone Readers

    Professor Kaiser Haq is not only Bangladesh's finest English language poets but one of the country's best translators as well. He translated Shamsur Rahman as early as 1985, when he was in his mid-thirties.

  • THE OVER TAKERS: STORIES TO MULL OVER

    I was scratching my head as I completed reading the first story in Wasi Ahmed's anthology of short stories entitled The Over Takers. I was scratching my head when I had finished the eleventh tale, also the last in the engrossing volume.

  • Lore of the Woman: The Bird Catcher and Other Stories

    A reader can perhaps assume from the back flap of Fayeza Hasanat's debut collection of short stories that the pieces revolve around a woman's position in society, familial relationships and identity that is constructed for her.

  • Not a Review, but Words of Heart: On Nausheen Eusuf's Not Elegy, But Eros

    Life is an elegy, written by time. The instinct of life itself is elegiac, for it always reminds us of fragmentations and jouissance. Life reminds us of things that “are gone into a world of light,” (as Eusuf writes in her poem,

  • White Tears: A New Look on Life

    White Tears is the fifth novel of Hari Kunzru who is a promising writer of the time, easily distinguishable for his consummate writing skills and imaginative boldness.

  • A "Philosophical Worldview" in Nature and Life

    Doing 'deep ecology' by any academically trained philosopher might be daunting insofar as it involves the task of conceiving environmental crisis in philosophical terms.

  • Titans at the Early CanLit Boom

    When we are at the verge of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and watching about more than ten thousand books getting published every year in Canada, it seems somewhat unbelievable that during the fifties of the last century the picture of Canadian book publishing world was very poor.

  • Kom Chena Boro Manush: Abdul Quadir

    The grainy black-and-white photo, printed in a new book on the Rohingya crisis authored by Myanmar's army, shows a man standing over two bodies, wielding a farming tool. "Bengalis killed local ethnics brutally", reads the caption.

  • The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages

    Mesmerised within “zones of blindness and insight,” the British anthropologist, author and multiple temporalities enthusiast Christopher Pinney has emerged with perhaps the finest homage to evanescence yet written, The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages.

  • A Reader's Guide to Writers' Britain

    Awakening your wanderlust, in hand is the ultimate travel guidebook to Britain's rich literary heritage. Here, innumerable destinations feature multiple authors, landscapes and legendary characters that transport both the studious and the curious into unforgettable literary trails.

  • Arundhati Roy and Our Reality

    Some days ago, a friend of mine who stays abroad, sent me a gift. Since he is very special to me, I was extra-eager to open the box and find out what it was.

  • The Bones of Grace: Rewriting History

    Tahmima Anam attracted an international readership when her debut novel A Golden Age (2007) won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book in 2008.

  • Poetry

    “How do I make you understand,

  • The Good Muslim: A Post-Liberation War Bangladesh

    “A novel asserts nothing; it provides a framework for thinking about things.” said Martin Amis, a British writer, in an interview with Rachel Cooke published in The Observer of 1 October 2006. Shortlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and long listed for the 2011 Man Asian Prize

  • The Good Muslim: A Post-Liberation War Bangladesh

    “A novel asserts nothing; it provides a framework for thinking about things.” said Martin Amis, a British writer, in an interview with Rachel Cooke published in The Observer of 1 October 2006.

  • The Ballad of Ayesha: Ayesha and Her Country

    Just like Behula, the people of Bangladesh never stopped persevering …

  • Letters to Namdeo Dhasal: Meditations of a Dalit Mystic

    Over the last decade, India has been experiencing a major geo-political shift with respect to class, caste and communal relationships.

  • UNTITLED

    No, you have no home.

  • BRUSH STROKES OF HISTORY AND A PERSONAL BRUSH

    This is an aberrant situation…well, read on. Alam, in his Itihasher Korcha, quotes the Natore-born eminent historian Sir Jadunath

  • Transatlantic Transitions: Back to Global Future?

    The term 'transatlantic relations' has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the study of relations between Europe and the United States.

  • Islam: A Short History

    History by definition denotes all the events that happened in the past but recorded, as Winston Churchill puts it, by

  • Djinn City: Myth and Mystery in Dhaka's Underbelly

    No need for a movie tonight! Grab yourself a cup of steaming hot chai, turn off all distractions, and get strapped in for the

  • A Tale of Rohingya: A Take on Dislocation and Displacement

    The life of refugee people has always been difficult, and in the current world it has taken on a monstrous form across borders.

  • Through the Eyes of Mrs. Funnybones

    Balancing beautifully between her panache and wit, Twinkle Khanna a.k.a. Mrs. Funnybones shares some insider's information of the

  • THE ETERNAL BARD

    Just the other day I was watching over CNN the celebrated journalist Christianne Amanpour prefacing her interview of the veteran

  • Nirbachito Galpa: A Reflection of Middle-Class Lifestyle

    Abul Hayat is a renowned Bangladeshi actor. Starting with Oedipus in 1969, he has acted in over five hundred plays to date. Not

  • The Best Asian Short Stories: Stories from a Changing Continent

    A son worries whether his mother, who is travelling alone, will be able to haul her luggage down from the conveyor belt. An elderly

  • A Review of The Sunset Club

    'Boorha Binch' is the term used by walkers and wanderers in the historical urban jewel that are the Lodhi Gardens in central New Delhi.

  • The Uprising of 1857

    There is perhaps no event in the long history of the British empire in India that continues to exert so strong and abiding a fascination as the great uprising of 1857.

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