APSARA ENGINE, South Asian graphic story collection

APSARA ENGINE
Bishakh Kumar Som
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: By turns fantastical and familiar, this graphic short story collection with South Asian roots is immersed in questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity.

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A beautiful work of South Asian-set and -themed mostly queer stories. All take place in elegantly, cleanly rendered spaces, involve women in transitional times and relationships, and stress the pleasures and/or complexities of being in the midst of Life.

these are the spreads provided for publicity use

The author's website contains much more varied artwork from the book. It is very much worth you time to view.
The stories themselves are not really interlinked, though all feel like they're meant to form something greater than the sum of their parts. If there's more than the thinnest connective tissue, though, I didn't find it. Straight people on a shoreline are surprised by merfolk accosting them; differing degrees of queer/trans people in their cells...apartments really, but cells in all the confinement senses...are the focus of the title story, one that fascinated me but never paid off in the way I was built up to expect. I think my personal favorite story was "Swandive," in which Onima...a "cartographer of trans realities" who uses her own blood to make maps, thus create art, that explains other Desi trans people to themselves.

It's not hard to see this opening a young trans person's eyes to the welcome reality that others feel the same way they do. No one in the 21st century, with all its stunning technological advances in medicine, psychology, communication should ever again feel isolated. A work like this that was created by someone deeply marginalized yet extending her hand to others, is a lifeline for a struggling trans person.

"You, as you are right now, are not alone and do not need to change to be loved" is still the most intensely powerful message you can send with this gift.