Swandive

“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.” Swandive (here) is only one of the eight short stories in Apsara Engine. Bishakh is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist and author.