Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Winner of The Gournay Prize - Ohio State University Press
Bomb Magazine Editor’s Choice
Lambda Literary December Most Anticipated LGBTQAI+ REading
New York Times Just Published
Inside Hook: Ten Books You Should Be Reading This December
Desi Books Book Recommendation December
Ms. Magazine December Reads for the Rest of Us
DARK TOURIST
Sirisena portrays how lives that do not conform to accepted standards can drive original art and a keener understanding of “the vastness of whatever it is that unfurls out of us: culture, history, time.” - Dana Isokowa, Poets & Writers
So many essay collections today feel forced into strict harmonies, becoming essentially full-length nonfiction narratives. The complexity and breadth of Dark Tourist complements Sirisena’s own take on meaning-making and art. -Ilana Masad, Bomb Magazine
After finishing Dark Tourist, a reader should expect to spend many moments considering Sirisena’s insightful take on life and its complications. You will want to hear more about her and from her. You will tell your other interesting and smart friends, “You need to read this book.” -Rachel Lutwick-Deaner, Southern Review of Books
“An insightful storyteller who examines disability, queerness, her Sinhalese roots, as well as “great love under duress,” Sirisena is also a critic at heart who scrupulously dissects political upheaval.” - Anjali Enjeti, The Millions
“Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection.” —Kirkus
“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.” —Publishers Weekly
“The essays of Dark Tourist ring with depth and unexpected associations, and Hasanthika Sirisena writes them as if her life depended on it. With an insistent and probing style, she examines art and illness, exclusion and familial bonds, violence and pride, teasing out the many ways these subjects ricochet off one another over the course of a well-observed life.”
—Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat
“Amidst the contexts of immigration, war, illness, and the comforts to be found in art, Sirisena invites us to pay closer attention to what we see and admire. These brilliant pieces offer portraits of courage for those whose ambitions have been sobered by grief. With lyricism and wit, Sirisena’s voice resounds with piercing beauty.”
—Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal
DESCRIPTION
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) that personal identity and the riptides of history meet: the 1961 plane crash that a left 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 the permanent aftereffects of 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 human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language’s ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.