By turns fantastical & familiar, this graphic short fiction collection is immersed in questions of gender, the body, & existential conformity.
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 non-binary 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 watercolours, 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.
