![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve played with the visual in both my novels: The Map of Salt and Stars features shape poems, while the protagonist’s deadname in The Thirty Names of Night is scribbled out by hand. Apsara Engine, which won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Comics, blew my mind, not only because seeing trans people of color loving each other and using their own blood to draw blueprints of fantastical cities and radical futures brought me to tears, but also because of Som’s masterful disruption of linear narrative and her lush, dreamlike illustrations.Īs a novelist, my love for the novel’s form has (perhaps paradoxically) always made me curious about what becomes possible when the page is freed from the tyranny of the written word. Som is lighting the way forward with a stunning blend of mythology, futurity, and courageous tenderness. Bishakh Som builds a world in which queer and trans South Asians not only survive, but map the very future. The first time I picked it up, I finished it in a single sitting. Imaginative and poetic, Apsara Engine is powered by a fiercely complex heart. I love the novels and stories whose gaze itself is queer, in the sense that they open my mind and heart to a more expansive imagining of what the world is and can be-while also allowing their queer and trans characters to have full, three-dimensional lives that don’t revolve around tragedy, or around queerness alone.īishakh Som’s graphic short story collection Apsara Engine is, without a doubt, one of those books. Many of the books that have made my life feel most possible as a queer, trans, Arab, and Muslim person have been works that look at queerness and transness almost from the corner of their eye. ![]()
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