{"product_id":"dark-tourist-essays","title":"Dark Tourist: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the 2022 LAMBDA literary award in bisexual nonfiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the 2021 Gournay Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection.\" --\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e \"Sirisena explores how stories can become a 'talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another's pain' in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut ... [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into.\" --\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e Dark tourism--visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others--takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena's stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father's stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka--the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner--to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth. Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art--and with language's ability to both fail and save us.\u003ci\u003e Dark Tourist\u003c\/i\u003e becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.","brand":"Mad Creek Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51164446851383,"sku":"9780814258125","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0934\/9926\/1239\/files\/imageloader_a73f4e05-a1ab-4bc1-9023-55f1998c0954.jpg?v=1759515539","url":"https:\/\/shop.queerbooks.com\/products\/dark-tourist-essays","provider":"Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni's Room","version":"1.0","type":"link"}