Apsara Engine

By Bishakh Som

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 

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781558616158

Bishakh Som

Bishakh Som is an Indian American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Autostraddle, We’re Still Here, Beyond, vol. 2, The Strumpet, the Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Vice, the Brooklyn Rail, Buzzfeed, Ink Brick, the Huffington Post, The Graphic Canon vol. 3, and Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. She received the Xeric grant in 2003 for her comics collection Angel. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2021 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Book preview

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