Dark Tourist

<p><b>Finalist for the 2022 LAMBDA literary award in bisexual nonfiction</b></p> <p><b>Winner of the 2021 Gournay Prize</b></p> <b>Shimmers with honesty vulnerability and circumspection. -<i>Kirkus</i><br> <br> 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. -<i>Publishers Weekly</i></b><br> <br> 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. <br>  <br> 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.<i> Dark Tourist</i> becomes then about finding a home if not in the world at least within the limitless expanse of the page.