"Som's imagination is science-fictiony, without being particularly technological, mythic without being particularly traditional, and humanistic without cherishing any particular assumptions about where we, as a species, are headed. Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comicsįinalist for the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel
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. Painted in rich sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak. I’ve played with the visual in both my novels: The Map of Salt and Stars features shape poems, while the protagonist’s deadname in The Thirty Names of Night is scribbled out by hand.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.
Apsara Engine, which won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Comics, blew my mind, not only because seeing trans people of color loving each other and using their own blood to draw blueprints of fantastical cities and radical futures brought me to tears, but also because of Som’s masterful disruption of linear narrative and her lush, dreamlike illustrations.Īs a novelist, my love for the novel’s form has (perhaps paradoxically) always made me curious about what becomes possible when the page is freed from the tyranny of the written word. The first time I picked it up, I finished it in a single sitting.
I love the novels and stories whose gaze itself is queer, in the sense that they open my mind and heart to a more expansive imagining of what the world is and can be-while also allowing their queer and trans characters to have full, three-dimensional lives that don’t revolve around tragedy, or around queerness alone.īishakh Som’s graphic short story collection Apsara Engine is, without a doubt, one of those books. Many of the books that have made my life feel most possible as a queer, trans, Arab, and Muslim person have been works that look at queerness and transness almost from the corner of their eye.
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