Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army's attacks on Bengali people. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, two novellas by Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq, bear bleak witness to the mindless violence and death of that period. Blue Venom tells of a middle-aged middle manager who is arrested and taken to a cell, where he is slowly tortured to death for being a namesake of a rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Forbidden Incense, meanwhile,...

Bhaskar Chakrabarti's poetry is synonymous with the romantic melancholia inherent to Calcutta. His trenchant poetic voice was one of the most significant to emerge in the 1960s and '70s--perhaps the most prolific period of modern Bengali poetry. Spanning the rise of militant leftism, the spread of crippling poverty across India, the war in Bangladesh, the influx of millions of refugees, the dark, dictatorial days of Indira Gandhi's reign, and the disillusionment of communist rule in Bengal, Chakrabarti's poems plumb the depths of urban angst, expressing the spirit of sadness and alienation in...

Bengali writer Riza Rahman is the author of more than fifty novels, as well as countless short stories, set in Bangladesh and bringing to life the difficult, mostly forgotten lives of its poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Letters of Blood is set in the often violent world of prostitution in Bangladesh. Rahman brings great sensitivity and insight to her chronicles of the lives of women trapped in that bleak world as they face the constant risk of physical abuse, disease, and pregnancy, while also all too often struggling with drug addiction. A powerful, unforgettable story,...

In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his -urban pastoral- lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented. Loneliness, anxiety, and dislocation trouble this verse, but they are balanced by a compelling belief in the...

The seventh-most spoken language in the world,Bengali is home to some of the most distinctivepoetry ever written anywhere. Starting with thelater poems of Nobel Laureate RabindranathTagore, there has been a long and continuousline of modern poetry in the language.