Review of "Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir" (Penguin, 2018)

TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide, death, and gore.

With the advent of the most anticipated literary festival for lovers of the written art, we have curated a list of five books for you to keep your eyes open for at Amar Ekushey Boi Mela this week. 

Some among us might have wondered what it feels like to hold a lit bomb between our palms. One that will go off inevitably yet its spark, heat, force, weight, and pulsating nature are so fascinating that we are unable to put it down or look away, all the while knowing at the end of the wick we too will be destroyed—a chosen death, a voluntary annihilation.

Never in his wildest imaginations had Aniket thought that everything would come together so well. Nearly everyone he invited had come.

The whole courtroom held their breath, waiting to hear Nizam's answer. As he nodded in affirmation, the enraged audience got off their seats to beat up the accused.

My father reasoned that he had grown up in a poor land that had been plundered by the colonial powers and he was not going to give away another national treasure

Shimu and Tushar had grown up together on an alley in the Mirpur area of Dhaka city. Their neighbouring houses were separated only by a brick wall, about two meters high. The branches of a tree growing beside Tushar’s house overhung the wall, its foliage shading a part of Shimu’s courtyard.

The beast bellowed below Mushfiq’s bedroom window, propelling rushes of tingles within him. He smiled.

Jhumpa Lahiri has always been the rare author whose prowess in the art of the short-story far surpassed her novelistic talents.

Some of these works have inspected the complex lives of modern Bangalis while some have traced the contours of our past often not examined. Here’s your chance to read some of the releases of this year by Bangladeshi authors, if you haven’t read them yet. 

I’m not sure when I first realised that we’d met before. In the beginning, you were just the elderly man I often noticed pottering around our communal rooftop.

The slamming of the front door sounded an ominous note, warning of trouble to come.

Today, I am covered in lines. Rust from the rain, and the occasional overflowing water from the drain paint my feet in unchangeable colours.

What I loved most as a reader about her is that her strength was not displayed in the conventional ways that most fantasy books tend to use to depict a powerful woman.

He had been practising saying his name out loud every night before going to sleep so that his ears remained accustomed to hearing his own name

The monsoons have passed. Moti has grown so healthy, so strong and so big that no other cocks even dare to be near him.

“It’s a type of Brazilian music, this elevator is playing The Girl From Ipanema.”

More than anything, Suzuki shows that the key to being an alien is not to be outlandish but to be sickeningly more human.

She walked, entranced, into the water until it reached her chin, the wing of her little pink butterfly stuck out like a shark fin.