Few living writers have moved between so many worlds with such ease. Neil Gaiman has written comic books that changed how a whole medium saw itself, and novels that sit comfortably on children’s shelves and adult bestseller lists alike. He has also written screenplays, audio plays and a Doctor Who episode that won a Hugo Award. He was born on 10 November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, which makes today his sixty sixth birthday. Yet his story can no longer be told as a simple celebration....

Every year, as autumn thins into the first cool evenings of Kartik, Bengali households prepare for a night that belongs to the unseen. Bhoot Chaturdashi is a ritual of memory, fear and food, and it arrives just before Kali Puja. It is part ancestor worship, part folk medicine and part ghost story, and it asks the living to remember that they are never entirely alone in their own homes. A date written in the moon The festival follows the lunar calendar. It falls on the fourteenth lunar da...

A plate of Kolkata biryani comes with a boiled potato beside the meat, and often an egg too. To many people elsewhere, especially in Bangladesh, this looks odd. Why would a dish of rice and meat need a potato? There are many popular answers, but the honest one is that no firm proof exists. An exiled nawab’s kitchen The story begins in 1856, when the British East India Company deposed Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh (Oudh). He left Lucknow for Calcutta and settled in Metiabruz, on...

The Meridian Drift had been silent for forty-one days when Dr. Anika Rahman noticed the crew was humming the same tune. She was the ship’s physician, and on a vessel of seven people, that meant she was also its confessor, its counselor, and its quiet keeper of secrets. The Meridian Drift was a long, slow needle threaded through the dark between Kepler-442 and home. Eleven months out, nine months to go. The crew ran in rotation, two on watch while the rest slept in cryo-lite, the shallow s...

For centuries, the Punjabi and Saraiki folk song has carried stories of romance, separation and sorrow. But who was Sammi, and why have so many legends become associated with her name?“Sammi Meri Waar, Main Waari.” The haunting refrain of this traditional Punjabi and Saraiki folk song has travelled across generations, carrying emotions that transcend language and geography. Often interpreted as an expression of unconditional love and devotion, the song is deeply rooted in the folk tradi...

On the Wellington coast, in a small suburb called Pukerua Bay, a boy of about nine set out to remake King Kong. He had no studio and no budget, only stop motion models and a stubborn imagination. More than half a century later, that boy, Sir Peter Jackson, stood on the stage of the 79th Cannes Film Festival and received an Honorary Palme d’Or for a lifetime’s contribution to cinema. Between the models and the medal lies one of the most unlikely careers in film history. A newspaper job...

Every year, as October runs out, something strange happens in ordinary neighborhoods. Porches that stayed plain for eleven months suddenly glow orange. Children who would never open a stranger’s door march up driveways in capes and plastic masks. Grown adults spend real money on fake cobwebs. A carved pumpkin with a candle inside sits on a doorstep like a small, grinning guard. It is easy to treat all this as harmless fun, a night of candy and costumes. But Halloween is one of the oldest survivi...

Dr. Nusrat Jahan had grown up believing the rivers of Bangladesh could hold any secret and keep it forever. She had not expected one to answer back. The launch from Bhola town took five hours through brown water the colour of strong tea. October monsoon rain hammered the tin roof of the cabin. By the time Char Kukri rose out of the mist, a flat island of mud and kash grass, with the drilling rig standing on it like a steel needle through a sleeping animal’s skin, her ears were already ach...

At the mouth of the Meghna, where river and sea stand facing each other with clasped hands, the land is never permanent. It is a beggar’s bowl, filled today and broken tomorrow. The river snatches from one bank and returns the gift on another, and in the middle people drive the posts of their houses into a promise nobody can guarantee. Dr. Tahmina Rahman had been keeping the accounts of that promise for twenty-two years. At the Water Resources Research Centre in Dhaka, her desk held a hea...

The carriage left me at the iron gates of Harrowmere Hall as the last light bled out of the sky. The driver did not wait. He flung my trunk into the mud, crossed himself twice, and whipped his horses back down the lane as though the very hedgerows were reaching for him. I stood alone before the house. It rose from the moor like a black tooth, its windows dark, its chimneys leaning against the clouds. Ivy had strangled the eastern wing so completely that the stone seemed to breathe beneath...

Somewhere off a rocky coast tonight, an octopus is easing out of a crevice no wider than a coin slot. It has no skeleton to stop it. It has three hearts, blue blood, and a nervous system spread through its body like a committee with no chairperson. It tastes the seafloor with its skin, changes color faster than a thought, and may be solving a problem that would stump a toddler. Then, for most of its life, it vanishes again into the dark. Today, October 8, is the day people stop to notice....

I am writing this by hand, on paper, because I no longer trust anything that listens. The Haor Radio Array stands on a raised earthen plateau in the wetlands of Sunamganj, four hours by road and one hour by boat from the district town. For half the year the land there is a sea. When the monsoon comes, the haor swallows the paddy fields, the village paths and the low roads, and the villages sit like islands on their mounds, each with its tin roofs and its mosque and its stubborn clusters o...

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, though Ridwan Chowdhury would later insist it had been a Wednesday, for Tuesdays in his memory had always been ordinary, and nothing about that letter, or the house it summoned him to, was ordinary in the slightest. It came sealed in wax the colour of dried blood, bearing a crest he did not recognise: a heron standing over a drowned man. Inside, in handwriting so cramped it seemed to be hiding from itself, an advocate named Halder informed him that his g...

On this day in 1947, a woman named Nellie Ruth King gave birth to a son in a modest hospital in Portland, Maine. Nobody in that delivery room could have guessed that the boy, christened Stephen Edwin King, would grow up to reshape the landscape of popular fiction, sell more than 350 million books worldwide, and become so synonymous with horror that his very surname now functions as shorthand for the genre itself. Today, as Stephen King marks his 79th birthday, it is worth pausing to consid...

He made 27 films in three years, changed how a generation of Bangladeshis dressed and spoke, and died at 24. Three decades later, the courts are still arguing about how. Walk into the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation compound in Tejgaon and there is a statue waiting for you. It is of a young man, permanently young, who last stood on that lot in the late summer of 1996 and never came back. Yesterday would have been his 55th birthday. Two weeks ago, marked 30 years since his death....

At 78, George R. R. Martin remains the most famous unfinished writer in the world, a storyteller who reshaped modern fantasy and then found himself trapped inside the expectations he created. On a peninsula in New Jersey, sometime in the late 1950s, a boy sold monster stories to the other children in his housing project for pennies, complete with dramatic readings. The business collapsed when a customer’s mother complained that her child was having nightmares. That boy was George Raym...

The launch left Sadarghat an hour after the evening azan, and by the time it crossed into the wider water I had stopped pretending to read. There is an hour on the rivers of this country when the light gives up all at once, the way a sick man gives up, and the far bank turns from green to grey to a long black seam. The wind off the water in Bhadra carries a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature. I was travelling to photograph a house before the river ate it. That was the...

In the low-lying wetlands of northeastern Bangladesh, where the Kalni river winds through Sunamganj district and the land floods every monsoon before drying into golden paddy fields, a farmer once sang songs so deeply felt that they outlived the poverty and obscurity of his birth and became part of the permanent soundtrack of Bengali culture. That farmer was Shah Abdul Karim, remembered today as Baul Samrat, the Baul Emperor, one of the greatest folk musicians and mystic philosophers Bangl...

On a clear, cloudless Tuesday morning in September 2001, the United States experienced the deadliest act of terrorism ever carried out on its soil. In the space of 102 minutes, nineteen men armed with box cutters and a plan rehearsed for years turned four passenger aircraft into weapons, killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the tallest buildings in New York City, tore a gash into the Pentagon, and left a smoking crater in a Pennsylvania field. The events of that day, now known simply a...

I The letter arrived on a Tuesday, damp at the corners as though it had traveled through rain that no calendar remembered. Eleanor Voss turned it over twice before she opened it, because the handwriting on the front was her aunt’s, and her aunt had been dead for six years. She read it three times standing in the hallway of her small London flat, coat still buttoned, before she understood what it was asking of her. Not a message from beyond, nothing so theatrical as that. The letter had...