'Watch out for that Taslima Nasreen,' warned my Bangladeshi friends. 'She's going to get into big trouble one of these days.' We were discussing the uproar over Nasreen's Selected Columns, which had just been published. It was February 1991, and I was in the capital of Bangladesh on a Fulbright Research Grant, translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers.

LRB 8 September 1994 | PDF Download