Name: Apsara Engine
ISBN: 9781936932818

Bishakh Som

"In trans illustrator Bishakh Som's debut work of fiction, questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity are explored over the course of eight speculative and graphic short stories"--

Apsara Engine

Sabrina D. 

…maps can circumscribe and set boundaries but can also lay the groundwork for an infinite number of itineraries, of infinite play within boundaries. You can think of a river as a gap, a chasm, or as a channel, as movement. I imagine trans geographies to be a means of using cartography as a generative tool rather than as a descriptive device. A way to chart possibilities, ways of being that have yet to manifest themselves. I imagine that trans bodies contain within them the capability to unlock potentialities as well. And that trans imaginations can realize new forms, new bodies, entire worlds—radical and novel psychic, social, economic, and political modes. Cartographies engender more expansive, connected, interdependent conceptions of this world, of possible worlds. If I tell you, “Meet me at the cafe across the way from the gasworks,” you’ll know the way even if you have never been there before because you have a map—a document that charts new territories. I imagine trans geographies as maps of a multiplicity of unknown destinations, each unlocking access to a further myriad of open nodes, a Kaleidoscope of addresses—a churning constellation of whereabouts. 

A weird book where a lot of nothing happens but you nonetheless come out feeling changed. Very Kafkaesque~ This was the first graphic novel I’ve read that actually read like a book of short stories more than a graphic novel. 

Apsara Engine

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