OKAY, my NO.1 pride rec to you this year: Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som
[ID: a graphic of the cover of the book on the left, and a photo of the author on the right. the cover has the title in block caps in the top middle and a background of futuristic, almost organic-like spaceship details. six South Asian women dance, lie, and sit together with two white cats. two women wear red swimsuits; two wear white; and two wear red sari-like(?) garments. in the author photo, Bishakh Som looks up at the camera, sitting on green grass. she wears a black dress with three-quarter sleeves and wears sunglasses on her head. her expression is neutral, and the wind blows her hair across her neck to the left. end ID]
AMAZING. it didn't actually come out this year, but that doesn't matter.
“Apsara Engine” is a collection of stories in graphic novel form, all about an LGBT-related disruption, mirroring disruptions in Som’s own life. (Hence the title: apsaras, according to Som, are a type of heavenly courtesans that she thinks of as being trans. “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."
"Writing these characters was saying there’s no difference between the possibilities and realities of gender"
