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trees dimmed in wet light
stag skin yields to canine tongue
shock primes the meat white

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Fresco On

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Birds, as it turns out, are endearingly strange. And in Mosco’s hands, they’re quite willing to speak for themselves, alongside the rest of the natural world. Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, a collection of comics intended for inquisitive minds of all ages, leans into this tonal jollity right away.

Panels like Birds Are Gross, Hawkward, and evolution sucks appear as an early and entirely conspicuous wink to the reader, familiarizing us with the work’s distinctly playful rhythm.

At the same time, information arrives coyly clad in feathers and scales, whether as dialogue or gamified visual explanations, always carrying a steady streak of wit.

There’s something particularly effective about the way Mosco pairs biological fact with conversational framing. Her approach lets the rest of the animal kingdom take on a more familiar shape, with its behaviors sitting just close enough to our own to compel a kind of residual empathy.

The result is a distinctly human aftereffect, deepening the rift between us and the world we inhabit—especially the numbness our senses have come to accept as inherent.

The book also has a habit of slipping across time in ways that gently thrill the mind, with modern bird species appearing alongside their slyly inserted ancestors, including a sharply clawed dromaeosaur. At the tip of Mosco’s pen, evolution feels less like a distant process than something still very much in motion.

But beneath the comedy—and nature’s harmonious veneer—the world begins to take on a more elaborate shape, revealing itself as something far busier.

We see plants evolving to fend off whatever is trying to eat them, and creatures adapting to keep eating them anyway. And so, the familiar picture of nature’s quiet ways starts to thin out.

In a sense, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game captures the peculiar triumph of lifting a rock to realize how many universes our blindness houses.

Even small details are given room to expand. The earthy smell of rain hitting dry ground is traced back to its bacterial roots, illustrated with a mix of wonder and irreverence that makes biology feel impish, especially in how it settles back inside us.

Mosco returns to this approach often, taking something ordinary and letting its underlying mechanisms come into view through its proximity to human senses.

There are also moments where the scope shifts outward. Climate change enters through its effects on other life forms, including the dissolution of shells and the distortion of senses caused by ocean acidification, folding larger environmental pressures into the same puckish visual language as the rest of the book.

And then, just as easily, it detours into something like a guide to Nature Names FOR YOUR BABY. Options such as “compressed flapwort” make an appearance, landing understandably low on the list of desirable monikers.

It’s a small inclusion, but it captures something central to the work’s tone: the sense that the natural world, especially when pushed against language, is just as absurd as it is intricate.

Taken together, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game moves easily between fact and play, using humor to keep its subject matter in motion—always slightly opening and reframing what we believe we’re looking at.

An advance copy was provided by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Path of Engagement

♜♝♞♜♝

Genre

Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga

Publication Date

July 28, 2026

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hare’s dusty throat drinks
gravity’s matted light deep
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A curated look at some compelling works arriving between March and May 2026.

Nature Poems to See By | Julian Peters

In Nature Poems to See By, Peters transmutes the musicality of language into visual resonance, drawing poem and image together in a way that furrows the fabric of interpretation. The illustrations themselves act as interpretive renderings of the verses, stimulating both the mind and senses.

Many traditional poems reappear in a modern context, where humanity battles and suppresses the beauty of life’s origin in an ode to nature freed from Man’s unfeeling touch.

And yet, the visuals add a deeply human component often absent in text alone. For example, we come across a blackbird singing bright and true, its belly swelling beneath the eyes of resting World War I soldiers—figures absent from Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop, though invoking the war waiting just beyond the poem’s stillness.

Peters also captures shades of green with a sharpness that peels back nature’s layers, inviting a reckoning with the art of recreation.

Across the collection, the medium is constantly at play: hand-drawn illustrations, curated magazine cutouts, and photographs with flecks of colored shapes born of a playful, inventive mind.

But not all is fair and quiet. Human forms bristle as they slide into their animalistic, “earth-born companions,” unsettling the boundary between what humans imagine as the divine and the divinely forgotten.

Rhina P. Espaillat’s Butchering receives an especially haunting treatment, with teary paintings livening the tensions between subject and object—and the shared nature of sentiment.

As a whole, the collection is a visual feast, experimental in format and rich in expressive possibility.

Most importantly, Peters’ imagery develops as parallel poems in their own right—destabilizing and new—leaving us caught fully between seeing and feeling, someplace between words and shades, and forever between the wild and the human.

An advance copy was provided by Plough Publishing House.

Genres

Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga | Poetry & Verse

Publication Date

March 24, 2026

What We Are Seeking | Cameron Reed

What We Are Seeking is a conceptually ambitious work that opens onto a landscape of impossible forms—from sense-defying entities to a self-compressing ship—and evokes an awe that firmly resists articulation.

The story follows John Maraintha, a medic sent to Scythia, a planet where nature obeys unfamiliar laws and survival is anything but temperate.

In this desert world—where the boundaries between the natural and the monstrous feel disturbingly thin—human customs can prove just as unforgiving as the landscape itself.

From the start, the worldbuilding feels rich and carefully imagined, particularly in its treatment of language, gender, and social custom, as well as the interweaving of nature with self-imposed constraints such as marriage, monogamy, or diet.

Through this lens, the novel invites a reconsideration of how life is organized and perceived. It privileges thought and interpretation, asking us to loosen familiar mental structures and reflect on how reality is informed by language, custom, and experience.

Reed’s writing also makes space for itself, allowing complexity to remain intact and letting moments of wonder settle rather than steering them toward a single conclusion.

Over time, though, this approach makes the reading experience somewhat difficult to sustain. The narrative devotes considerable attention to explanation and groundwork, with relatively little forward momentum through character or event.

Most notably, the protagonist remains largely peripheral, both to the world he enters and to his own inner life.

Because of this distance, even moments of physical intimacy are filtered through a detached, clinical perspective, registering entirely as functional rather than sensorial or emotional. While a low-action structure can be effective, it’s easy to find oneself missing an emotional point of contact.

In the end, the framework is strong and compelling, but the relationship between concept and embodiment may feel too restrained for some.

Readers drawn to speculative fiction or science fiction that prioritizes perception, social design, and intellectual exploration over plot or emotional immediacy will likely find What We Are Seeking highly rewarding.

An advance copy was provided by Tor Books.

Genres

Sci-Fi & Fantasy | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

April 7, 2026

Everything Dead & Dying | Tate Brombal

As a seemingly lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse, Jack Chandler has chosen to preserve a facsimile of life in his town. He’s found that, through routine feedings, he’s able to keep the monstrous instincts of his fetid community at bay, including those of the husband and adopted daughter he once fought his own demons to keep.

But when outsiders eventually discover the town, Jack becomes the final barrier between his family and those determined to rid the world of the liminal.

Right away, Brombal’s narrative settles into a muted visual register, animated by Jacob Phillips’ artwork and Pip Martin’s color design. Shades appear heavily desaturated, with shadows blurring the edges between backdrop and flesh to wring the atmosphere into a state of bated unrest.

While the past surfaces in brighter tints, the present carries blighted tones marked by time and decay. The movement between them feels almost pendular, with memory slipping through the present to reveal the strain working its way from within each character.

All the while, different hells push to gather in the same space: grief, memory, loss, violence, and the slow persistence of the undead.

As these layers thicken, the emotional tension of the story comes into keener focus. Devotion, commitment, and fatherhood move doggedly through the narrative, shaping a world where the boundary between the human and the inhuman no longer holds steady.

Even when the imagery turns gory, the narrative’s tissue feels mostly woven from suggestion, allowing the deeper questions of care, purpose, and attachment to bear the weight of our expectations.

Ultimately, Everything Dead & Dying settles into something more intimate than survival-based, with its vision of life shaped by the fragile realities our emotions learn—often tragically—to press into the world.

An advance copy was provided by Image Comics.

Genres

Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga | Horror | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

May 5, 2026 (Collects all issues, #1–5)

Sixty Stories | Donald Barthelme

In Sixty Stories (first published in 1981), Barthelme tests the limits of perception, probing that strange space where the surreal and the absurd come together. There, identity twists through language, reality bends under bureaucratic logic, and the everyday quietly shapeshifts into something both comic and disturbing.

There’s a distinct tension present from the start of the short story collection that reveals something central to Barthelme’s play with form: the surreal and the absurd—understood in a distinctly Kafkaesque sense—continually refract each other.

As we quickly learn, in Barthelme’s hands, bureaucracy consistently overwrites experience, and the result stabs at the skin’s solace.

Perhaps no story captures this more headily than Me and Miss Mandible, which echoes many a nightmare and remains provocative even now.

Here, a thirty-five-year-old veteran and insurance adjuster finds himself attending school alongside eleven-year-olds who are—technically—his peers, all while being lusted after by his teacher. The absurd logic of his circumstances is laid out in the first paragraph:

Interestingly, across the collection, life’s surreal deviations are rarely framed as forces to reckon with. Instead, they resemble small betrayals that are ultimately nothing more than quietly accepted conditions of living. This, in turn, leads us to the absurdity of aching for coherence.

And while Barthelme’s self-assured humor is delightful, his stories rarely remain content with surface-level playfulness. His surrealism is often pushed far enough that the illicit thrill of bending reality begins to flatten; once no rules apply, the tension shifts.

As a result, what initially reads as droll unease quickly steels itself into something closer to hurt: an awareness that the signs we’re taught to read as the truth—the paths laid out for us in school and childhood—may have been unsteady and meaningless all along.

Language itself becomes one of Barthelme’s most restless instruments. In For I’m the Boy, syntax loosens, with quotation marks—and at times, the usual punctuation—slipping off the page as the prose dips toward something like stream of consciousness.

Will You Tell Me? moves in a parallel direction, stripping the prose to its rudimentary form with little connective flow between sentences:

The result leaves us scrambling. Lives accumulate in fragments—scene upon scene stacked and trimmed—demanding a peculiar intensity of attention. One begins to wonder how much emotional force the most denuded of sentences can carry, and how the placement of letters alone dictates mood and understanding.

In a sense, many of Barthelme’s linguistic experiments circle a similar disturbance: a mislocation of the self. Identity seems to glide around the very structures meant to solidify and restrain it.

Game, for example, homes in on the absurd logic of military obligation while quietly destabilizing the narrator’s grasp on reality, echoing Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) to fine effect:

If Sixty Stories sometimes pushes its surreal gestures so far that their pressure dissipates, the collection nonetheless remains fascinating for the risks it takes with form and language.

Importantly, Barthelme’s stories repeatedly test how far narrative can stretch before coherence gives way—revealing, in the process, how easily the systems meant to hold experience expose their emptiness.

An advance copy was provided by Picador.

Genre

General Fiction (Adult)

Publication Date

May 26, 2026

Noted in Passing

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A story by A. Anton

Luisa had worked the upper corridor of the Hotel Salvaje for nine years and had learned, in that time, how to read a room. Not so much what people left behind, that much was easy enough to parse, but what the rooms held when she opened them in the mornings.

The particular residue of a night.

She wasn’t sentimental about this. It was simply information, and she had become good at receiving it.

Room nineteen smelled, on the first morning, of a cologne she didn’t recognise and spent some time trying to place. Bergamot, and underneath it something sweeter, something that had no name she could find in the names she had catalogued over forty-six years of life.

The bed had been slept in diagonally, one pillow on the floor, the sheets roped into themselves at the bottom as though time had been in need of a shape to abandon.

The window was open to its limit. On the desk was a paperback, left face-down with the spine cracked back hard, and a glass with a watermark at the bottom. There was a faint print on its side where fingers had held on.

She straightened the book from habit.

Room fourteen was different. The bed was made, but clearly by someone who knew the correct way to go about things and had chosen this morning to leave routine one step shy of complete.

There was a cream towel in the bathroom, thicker than the hotel towels, and two leather shoes at the foot of the bed, placed parallel with an exactness that sat oddly against the half-made sheets. On the nightstand was a glass of water, still full.

There was also a book with a receipt inside it marking the place, and beside the book, pressed flat, a photograph she did not look at directly. She turned it over with the corner of her cloth and let it lie.

She would have said, if asked, that the man in room fourteen was a person who applied himself to the management of things and found in this some form of relief. She was right about this and wrong about what it cost him.

She saw them together for the first time on Friday morning from the corridor window overlooking the pool, a long blue rectangle, and beyond it the sea going on.

The one from room nineteen, greeted once in passing, was coming out of the water, or had just come out. He was standing at the pool’s edge, letting the water run off him, unhurried, his head bent forward as drops moved from his hair down the swell of his mouth.

The one from room fourteen, seen sometimes leaning idly against the corridor wall, lay on a sun lounger with a book in his hands. He was not reading.

She could tell, from years of watching people arrange themselves around books, the particular quality of eyes moving across a page—and the particular quality of eyes that are not—and his were not; they were at the approximate level of a paragraph, and somewhere beyond words.

The one from the water walked to a chair, picked up a towel, and worked it through his dark hair without looking at the other one. With, she thought, quite a lot of effort, not looking at the other one.

She watched the man with the book turn a page.

Their names she knew from the bookings, overheard in passing. Sebastián, from room nineteen. Callum, from fourteen. She thought of Sebastián first and most easily because he was the kind of person rooms remembered differently: something residual in the air she entered each morning that was not unpleasant and not entirely neutral.

Callum’s room gave less away, which, as she had learned over nine years, was itself a form of information.

On Friday evening, she was finishing up on the far end of the corridor when she heard the stairwell door swing open and voices in it, low, already mid-breath. She did not intend to hear. The acoustics in that corridor were a longstanding problem.

Sebastián’s deep voice came first, something she didn’t catch fully, the shape of it more than the content, and already taking up all the space inside her.

Then came Callum’s gasp. “You’re doing it on purpose.”

And a silence in which she could hear the air turn over.

“Of course,” Sebastián murmured.

A door clicked open. She heard the sound Callum made before it closed, not quite a laugh and not quite its opposite, and then the corridor was ordinary again, and she stood with her hands on the cart, warm palms against the metal, with the drag of the sea coming through the open window at the far end.

On Saturday morning, Luisa was collecting linens from the cupboard near the bar terrace when she heard Sebastián’s voice at a distinctly social register, warm and unhurried.

She looked around the corner, and there he was with a French couple who had arrived earlier that morning. The woman was lovely and knew it, and her partner was handsome in the way of men who have been told so once and are still deciding what to do with the information.

Sebastián stood close to the woman, but it seemed that he had arrived at the exact distance at which his closeness spoke more of detachment. When she laughed, she leaned towards him, one ruby-nailed hand sweeping up her bare thigh as the other came briefly to the wiry hair on his forearm.

He let it rest there before she withdrew it, and he was talking the whole time, his handsome face open and warm, a face that had in it none of the guardedness Luisa had seen in glimpses from the corridor window.

Then, she noticed Callum at a terrace table.

He had a half-drunk coffee that must have been there long enough to turn oily, and he was not drinking it.

He was looking at Sebastián. More precisely, he was looking at the place on Sebastián’s arm where the woman’s hand had been, and was near enough to skim once more, and his own hands were around his coffee cup with a stillness that was not at all comfortable to observe.

His face was level, and Luisa had the feeling, watching him, of standing near something that was generating a great deal of heat.

Sebastián turned. He would have had to exert some effort not to see Callum across the terrace, and he was clearly not in the mood for labour. He looked at the light-haired man with a directness that did not acknowledge the French couple or the afternoon heat or anything else in the world, only whatever was moving between them.

His chin lifted. A degree, perhaps less.

Callum looked at him for a moment and then looked at his coffee, drank it cold, and set it down. Sebastián turned back to the French couple. His hand went briefly to the woman’s shoulder, bare and soft-looking.

He said something that made her laugh again, and the laugh was real, Luisa could tell a real laugh, and when she glanced back at Callum’s table, his hands were flat on the surface on either side of the cup, long fingers pressing down on it slightly, as though the table needed steadying or the cup overturning.

She heard them through the wall that afternoon.

Room fourteen shared plumbing with room fifteen, and both the pipes and the thin plaster between them had always been porous to sound in ways she had learned not to be startled by.

She was changing the towels in room fifteen when she heard them.

Callum’s voice came through first, a sound she needed a moment to process as coming from him, as belonging to that level face and those careful shoes and the untouched glass of water on the nightstand. It came at a register unaware of being heard, just the body’s own cry about what was being done to it.

Then Sebastián's voice, very low, almost nothing. Luisa stood unmoving, the wall between them thin enough to carry everything.

A sound came through it, distinct and involuntary, abandoned on its way to being a word, and she stood in room fifteen with a towel against her chest and heat moving up through her and the sea through the window going on, enormous, indifferent, and the shivery sounds from the other side of the wall human and small and not small, the sounds of two bodies past pretending, and then Sebastián’s voice again saying something she caught only in part, twice, and the way he said it both times was the way you rip a thing out of yourself that you have been trying not to name.

She left before it was finished. She sat in the linen cupboard at the end of the corridor and folded a towel and unfolded it and pressed her palms flat on her thighs, squeezed against the pulse between them, and waited for her body to settle into something she could carry. It took some time.

Monday morning, room nineteen.

The cologne settled inside her before she had the door fully open. She had developed, over the past few days, a relationship with this smell that she could not have described to anyone.

The sheets were a damp heap. Both pillows on the floor this time, and the bedside glass empty, and on the rail a towel that was thicker than the hotel’s, a creamier white, which she understood to mean that the man from room fourteen had come here with the expectation of showering, which meant a further sequence of information she dealt with by straightening the towel and moving on.

On the desk, she found a receipt from a bar in town, placed beside the hotel pen. She did not read it. And beside the bin was a shirt, good linen, dropped rather than placed, and on the collar of it was the absence of a button, just a small intact circle of thread.

In room fourteen, the bed was made more correctly than any previous morning, almost entirely correctly, the sheets pulled and untucked just enough to seem like the bed had been slept in.

On the nightstand, the glass of water was full and untouched again, and beside it the photograph that she had noticed on the first morning stood upright, propped against the lamp, and she looked at it this time without intending to.

Two young boys on a seafront she didn't recognise, though she had grown familiar with the men they would become.

The lighter-haired one was laughing with his whole body, his shoulder pressed into the other’s. The other one was looking at the laughing one with the expression of someone taking in something they believed they could not survive. Neither of them yet sixteen, at a guess. The photograph was worn at the edges.

Luisa replaced the glass of water with a fresh one and left the photograph where it stood.

She closed the door behind her and stood a moment in the corridor with the sea moving in the window at the far end of the corridor and the smell of Sebastián’s cologne on her hands from when she’d handled the sheets, bergamot and underneath it that sweeter thing, the thing she had never managed to name or stop anticipating, and she breathed it in and then pushed the cart forward and went on.

On Tuesday afternoon, she saw them at the pool again from the corridor window. They were both in the water. Sebastián was saying something, lips at Callum’s ear, one arm along the pool’s edge past Callum’s shoulder so that his body bracketed the other’s strain.

Callum had his head slightly turned away, his jaw set against the gooseflesh down the column of his neck, eyes fixed in the middle distance, and stomach heaving with the chest’s ebb. Luisa understood the moment without having to look below the water’s surface.

The French woman came to the edge of the pool then. She said something to Sebastián, her hand shading her eyes, her long hair reaching past the hips angled towards the man’s mouth.

Sebastián’s face opened into warmth the way it so often did, the way it always seemed ready to do, effortless and genuine. They spoke for a moment, and she laughed, and all the while Sebastián’s other hand was moving in the water by Callum’s hip.

Whatever it was doing underwater, Luisa couldn’t see, only that Callum’s throat moved, a single swallow, and the hand resting on the pool’s rim went white at the knuckles and then released.

When the French woman left, Sebastián looked at Callum with a look that was not at all like the one he had given her. Callum looked back at him with an expression that was close to pain but beyond it somehow, in the territory pain eventually reaches when it has become the weather.

Then Callum said something, but he must have said it quietly because Sebastián leaned in as if to hear him better.

After a moment, the dark-haired man pressed closer still, and his hand slid up the back of Callum’s neck, fingers tangled in the ends of his hair, and Callum’s eyes fluttered once and didn’t open again for some time.

The French woman settled onto a sun lounger with a book. A couple near the deep end were laughing about something. The sea went on behind everything, big and blue and entirely lost to the specifics of human need.

Luisa stood at the window with her cart and her clean towels, nine years of professional distance holding her still, watching the hand beneath the water that she could not see, and she stayed a moment past when she should have left, and then made herself leave.

They checked out on Wednesday. She did room nineteen last and was not honest with herself about why.

The cologne hit her at the door. She stood in it a moment before entering, her hand still on the frame. The bed was left in its usual state, with pillows scattered across the mattress and sheets piled at the foot of it.

The desk was clear except for the hotel pen and an empty glass with two handprints on it, eight fingers and two thumbs, which she looked at for a moment before moving on.

In the bathroom was his cologne. She picked up the overlooked bottle and held it, and then quickly sprayed some on her cuff and put it back.

She opened the window to its limit, as he had always had it, and stood in the moving air from the garden, the lemon trees below, the amber glow, and the smell of bergamot and the sweetness coming off the sheets and walls, where nine years of attention had taught her rooms hold what they are given and give it back whether you want it or not.

In her pocket was the shirt button, warm from days of being carried around. She took it out and held it and then placed it on the desk beside the hotel pen, for no reason she could name.

Once the room had been cleaned, she took hold of the cart and closed the door, and went down the corridor towards the window and the sea in it, past the reach of any of it, past all their heat and hunger and the poor thin walls of the rooms that held them, enormous and unmoved.

She stood for a moment at the window.

The warm air from the garden moved up the corridor, carrying the faint zest of the lemon trees, and under it still the trace of the cologne on her hands and sleeve.

For a moment, without intending to, she remembered another smell, from another time, the sweetness of a room with the shutters closed against the morning light, the two of them staying in bed long past the hour when people rose and ate, her nightdress twisted off her soft belly and legs.

She remembered finding the place where her husband’s taste had come and dried again, the sense then that the body could go on like that without end, that whatever lay beyond the shutters belonged to someone else.

It had not lasted. Nothing like that ever did, she told herself. It grew and stretched and fought its own shape.

She rested her hands on the cart until the warmth in her settled. The sea moved in the window, blue and wide and entirely without memory, and she breathed once, deeply, and pushed the cart forward.

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