Bishakh K. Som

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 show more 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. show less

If I really must rate this I'd say it's middle-of-the-road compared to Apsara Engine, but that's kind of unfair because 1. Apsara Engine is such an extremely bold breakout collection that covers so many different kinds of things (including some genre stuff that's especially catnippy for me) and 2. this is still a fascinating sort-of-memoir comic, solidly written and drawn, with some startling choices that I think make the meandering parts work a lot better than they otherwise would, and it show more doesn't really remind me of any other book in that category. The big moment when a love-interest character confronts the protagonist, and finally points out an issue that's been entirely left out of the story so far, is a powerful one—not just for being conceptually surprising (it's almost the exact opposite of how such realizations are often presented, in more than one way), but also because of how Som underplays it and lets the characters choose to carry on and table it for now, without any big changes in the storytelling approach. That's insightful in terms of how major epiphanies really can take a long time to visibly bear fruit even after the cards are on the table. There are also long stretches of mundane family/career/lifestyle observations which can feel more tentative and formless; to some extent I think that's necessary in order for the later parts to have the impact that they do, and there's plenty of well-observed detail—and I'm not sure I've ever seen this kind of experience of feeling like you're probably an artist, but never getting anything done, depicted so convincingly in terms of how the feeling is often "I'm boring and I have no real problems or interests and I should be focusing on practical things" rather than "I'm a deep tortured soul." I identify with that for sure and I can imagine it won't work as well for some other readers. And it's clear that (as the author says in the foreword) the book wasn't exactly planned out that way and took a while to find its feet, but I like where it lands and the messiness just makes me more excited to see what's next. show less

Having seen a little of Som's early work—which had a distinctive aesthetic and a lot of technical skill, and an introverted literariness that I identified with and was also a little suspicious of—I was awfully happy to see all of those things fulfilled in so many different ways in this stunning collection. These stories cover a lot of territory in terms of subject and genre and structure, but I think they'd all be unmistakably by this author even if I couldn't see the art, both because show more of a few common themes and because the writing has such a good ear, and manages to convey some pretty intense and even alarming emotional action, within a very precise tone that makes both the grounded realistic parts and the wild fantasy material feel deeply eerie in a way I love; it's calmly yet joyfully eerie. I guess the range and passion and experimentation here is what I might expect for a set of stories that (as I understand it) were created over a couple of decades during some big personal changes; still, everything here is so fully realized that it comes across to me as a cohesive vision, just one that looks different from different angles. show less

Wow. This is definitely the best book I've read so far this year, and it was perfect to read during pride month! Apsara Engine is a graphic novel collection of short stories that all revolve around the theme of "LGBT-related disruption" and star South Asian women.

Content warnings:
- age difference (Come Back to Me)
- cheating (Come Back to Me)
- drowning (Come Back to Me)
- ableism (Throat)
- racism (Throat)
- sexual harassment (Pleasure Palace)

I found a really cool interview with Bishakh Som, show more where she writes,

"Apsaras, who are in a lot of Hindu mythology, they’re the showgirls of the heavens, these heavenly courtesans, dancing and performing. There’s a legacy of performance with South Asian trans women, and I think of them as apsaras too. I wanted to take these characters who were inhabiting the fringes of mythology and bring them into the spotlight and show that apsaras can manifest themselves as people and as beings on this earth. They don’t have to be in this other realm, but rather, they can be part of this existence, and they don’t have to be necessarily benign presences, either. Because a lot of the stories of apsaras are about disruption. They come to fuck shit up—for the better, I think.

“[…] These presences—visually, these images of goddesses—were always around me as a child. So that seeped into me very, very deeply, and was part of my everyday existence. It was a very spiritual and visual experience for me, rather than one that had to do with dogma. It was a sense of the beauty and wonder and divine energies of these goddesses as something that one could channel if one was so inclined.”

All of these stories definitely have that sort of disruption—for the better or the worse—and they are also eerie and surreal, with one of the most beautiful art styles I have ever seen. The stories are also sometimes a little too opaque for me to understand fully, but all that makes me want to do is find someone to discuss it with. Because they all hold several different interpretations.

It's difficult for me to articulate my thoughts about this one, because it's just that unique and mesmerizing. My favorites were "Throat" and "Swandive." If you have the chance, give this collection a read! show less