Apsara engine

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Title:

Apsara engine

Author:

Som, Bishakh, 1968- author, artist.

ISBN:

9781936932818

Edition:

1st Feminist Press ed.

Physical Description:

237 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm.

Contents:

Come Back to me -- Throat -- Meena and Aparna -- Apsara Engine -- Pleasure Palace -- Swandive -- Love Song -- I Can See It in You.

Subject Term:

Short stories -- 21st century.

Interpersonal relations -- Comic books, strips, etc.

Mythology, Indic.

Genre:

Graphic novels.

Short stories.

Summary:

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.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove)	GRAPHIC SOM	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	GRAPHIC SOM	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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

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

Author Notes

Bishakh Som is an artist, illustrator, and writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, BuzzFeed, the Boston Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her books include Apsara Engine, Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir, and The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History, and she was also a contributor to We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. Some is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Som's provocative collection of short comics explores the idiosyncrasies of gender, desire, friendship, courtship, family, and culture through speculative fiction. Each of her eight stories, rendered in fine pen and exquisite watercolor, explores a different facet of life in distinct futures, with a focus on South Asian perspectives and cultures. "Apsara Engine" is the least narrative of the bunch, a puzzle-like mapped series of vignettes of futuristic people on the phone, in lust, and attaining nirvana. In "Throat," a man is confronted with an acquaintance's pet human/dog hybrid and finds it more intelligent than its owner believes, while "I Can See It in You" finds an interracial couple in strife after an impossible guest crashes a party. The resonant "Swandive" features two desi transgender people who meet at an academic conference, bond, and map out a glorious urban trans future in (literal) blood. Som's delicate lines are turned to sharply expressive faces and gestures, with subtle sepia tinting the stories and luminescent, layered colors on chapter openers reminiscent of retrofuturistic stained glass. And the font is a precise cursive, as if pulled from an illuminated manuscript. Som is a master of pacing, letting the emotion of her scenes churn and roil in the reader; her debut heralds the rise of new talent to watch. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

A woman goes out for her regular evening walk on the beach, contemplating her relationship with her husband, until she sees a mermaid washed up on the shore. And here text and graphics suddenly diverge: the words reveal a recent affair, while the frames depict the mermaid dragging the woman down into dark waters. That mesmerizing juxtaposition in "Come Back to Me" inaugurates Som's extraordinary debut collection, signaling an exceptional graphic achievement. Other prodigious standouts include "Pleasure Palace," about two unlikely strangers who meet at a posh resort and, as the older woman offers the younger man a glimpse of a mythic past, unexpectedly leave together; "Swandive," in which a pair of conference attendees are drawn together by their flesh and--literally--blood as they map out a wondrously inclusive future; and "I Can See It in You," about an interracial couple whose party-going--and perhaps their very relationship--is interrupted by a not-so-mysterious intruder. Richly hued, gorgeously lettered, and often exquisitely detailed, Som's work, the writing as well the art, presents a brave new world of diverse women--talking, dancing, dreaming, plotting--living among friends, lovers, and chimerical creatures, in familiar cities and faraway landscapes, balancing the expectantly mundane with the utterly fantastical.

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review

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