Apsara Engine

By Bishakh Kumar Som

Book Overview

Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel/Comics

Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comics

Finalist for the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction

The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality. A woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.

Painted in rich, sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds--which ring all too familiar--Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.

"An astonishing collection of stories that expand and pulse into galaxy-sized moments of strangeness and wonder." --Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

"Som has created a collection of short stories that dance between genres and identities, moving from incisive descriptions of modern social realities to poetic ruminations on the future. This anthology by an up-and-coming comics superstar, which centers queer and trans South Asian narratives, is precisely what we need right now." --Them

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1936932814
• ISBN13: 9781936932818
• Release Date: April 2020
• Publisher: Feminist Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.5" x 10.9"