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aromatics slit
powdered corset of her cheeks
smell of lover’s seed

Into Ekphrasis

FIRST READ

composed / watchful / intoxicating

• feeling pulled from efficiency: the rural setting and its people arrive without the usual procession of detail, with the prose moving so nimbly that anything burdensome simply misses the carriage

• the two men, still boys in many ways, come saddled with the consequence of lives partially lived out under different skies

  • their exchanges reveal a novel exquisitely attuned to pursuit and evasion: glances, words, and silences keep reaching for a place already vacated by the other

TABLE TALK

alert / clipped / jocular

• the foreign tourist’s accent sits awkwardly at the mouth of the ear

  • in a twist as elegant as it is amusing, the Western traveler ends up the linguistic and cultural oddity

    • to Pavan, born and bred deep in the womb of the Indian countryside, the impracticality of the fork points to a small civilizational absurdity

• the world is viewed at a slant, with perspective becoming a shifting arrangement of intimacies

• syntax shepherds emotion: clipped sentences compress the body, while longer ones soften muscle back into silhouette

• muted, wry humor stretched by a static mouth

  • that initial comic edge recedes, weathered by the abrasions of living

PACE

sidestepping / tightening

• a dance of attention and withdrawal, where retreat sharpens advance and shifty glances slip on pools of their own alarm

• instead of muddying the lens, time fogs it: Pavan and Neville flow in and out of focus like bodies finding each other for the first time in bed

• naked and disquieted, the plot swells to the panting of a cornered creature

  • every chapter pulls against the one before it, each carrying its own strain and answering to the projections of the man temporarily holding the other’s image

• toward the middle, memory seems to pile too much of the narrative into itself, burying it in the bruise of recollection

  • this places a halting hand against the novel’s appetite for movement

TOUCH

humid / swollen / damaging

• not so much arousing as aroused

  • in the wintery countryside, the air nips chapped mouths; in the city, heat lays thickening hands on swollen thighs

• the hotel where the two men initially meet makes intimacy feel pre-contaminated, as though the touch of an unseen witness has already entered the room

• at a time when same-sex acts are prohibited, thrill, tension, and thirst are hoarded within the body’s divisions, making reading Half Light feel like bodily trespass

• tangy enough to be savored, with freshness and rot meshed on the floor of the same breath

• makes tiny incisions in the mind

  • anxiety warmed by desire, exhilaration made supplicant to aversion

• recklessness slips free of the tongue’s heat, carrying with it the derangement of unfamiliar flesh held too deep

• Rao captures that animal vigilance born of threat: a painful vivacity pinned cheek-to-page by language of exquisite precision

THE SLIP

• can’t help but marvel at how readily life strips a man back to a boy, or browbeats a boy into becoming a man

• Pavan moves through life as though survival invariably demands self-consumption, biting off pieces of himself to continue forward

  • he invites our compassion so quickly that it risks becoming another form of alienation

    • are we infringing on his thoughts, or has the novel wrung intimacy into transgression

• as Half Light progresses, the two men increasingly misstep, leading to something unsightly happening to the figures we’ve already pressed ourselves against

• through Neville’s dating-app presence, we follow the seam between virtual hunger and bodily encounter, feeling projected intimacies fray against the resistance of being seen

• far removed from romance, the novel seems drawn to ideas of proximity, dependence, and the exhaustion of living in fear’s company

CAUGHT THE EYE

• the sky shedding shrapnel

• semen smeared across the surface of an exhaling curtain

LATER THAT NIGHT

• history arrives from the side: the decriminalization of homosexuality in India remains mostly a headline when it enters the narrative, bringing to mind a flake of skin shed by the body it once allowed to feel

• the novel presents progress as something woefully—and realistically—sluggish, stressing how distant public victories can feel to those who’ve lived their lead-up as harm rather than history

• nevertheless, we’re soothed by a sense of belonging; quiet triumphs and enduring grief make up the cells of an organism striving for vitality

WEATHERED MOOD

humid / apprehensive / bodily

• an ambient world seething with moisture, musk, brine, and the din of distress

• Pavan sleeps beside his disaffection, folded inward until all sensation inevitably becomes suspect

• Neville endures—and effects—separation from his pious mother, struggling with both proximity and its disorienting lack of determination

• unconcerned with desire’s destinations but attentive to its graceless gait

AFTERTASTE

salted / exhausted / unexpectedly sated

salt spray on the face following an afternoon of dogged heat; something elemental arriving once the body has nearly forgotten how to receive it

An advance copy was provided by Pushkin Press.

THE NIGHT’S TURN

GENRES

Literary Fiction | LGBTQ+

PUBLICATION DATE

September 15, 2026

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FIRST READ

shy but clearly hiding something / somehow already mid-conversation

• hunger meets its reflection, returning the dulled animal to us: the one drawn to the scent of all that is trivial, and therefore toothsome

TABLE TALK

startling / self-composed / alluringly distant

• brought into focus through outlawed language (“beautiful”), there’s the urge to align the world’s edges with the body’s flourish

• tonally, the moves are so smooth they’re almost startling—so startling they arouse a sense of dazed familiarity

  • particularly in Intimacy, which stabs its own concept with lulling strokes

• the kind of comedy that can only be called human, though not anything that can be called comedy in return

PACE

escalating through osmosis

• scene upon scene, with the body as the curtain, drawing the eye, the finger, the mouth parting to let the next act through

• occasionally, but very rarely, memory’s bite sinks too deeply into the present, pulling language back into the density of the scene and away from poetry’s elevation

  • it’s then that a patchwork of whetted points is needed to make up a sensation

TOUCH

insistent / disorienting / tender

• an estrangement from the world, but still bound to it as if incapable of leaving intimacy’s periphery

• weighed down by an almost romantic compulsion

  • the world puts its mouth on us, sees us…though not as we are

• a lithe body of lyrical and narrative writing, pressed close in the dark

  • snippets of a life lived from the outside, with each tissue of unnerved text slowly worked back into it

• a dissociative relationship with all that moves in and out—and around—a body propelled by the desire to desire life

• the stillness of that hunger is self-immolating

• wrestles with a certain hopefulness that he’ll not only be found by the world in that stillness, but claimed by it

  • felt most keenly when his thumb sneaks into the frame as he photographs posing strangers, hoping for his presence to be tenderized as pixelated flesh

• a form of restlessness muffled by its own temperament

LATER THAT NIGHT

earned / inevitable in hindsight

everything slips into place: we find ourselves at the point where a lost lover’s absence is touched to be felt, with hands placed all over a shadow that sidesteps its own stillness

THE SLIP

a growing sense of unease with all that the speaker is capable of shedding about himself, all that he is capable of turning around to face

CAUGHT THE EYE

children kicking a used condom back and forth while screaming “jellyfish!”

WEATHERED MOOD

muted / restrained / tense

a life devoured by the lyricism of vacated pain

AFTERTASTE

clarified / hollowed, then refilled

like holding a scalded hand in the path of rushing water: a shocking reminder that there’s another moment past the flaring of nerves, another sensation beyond the cascading moment

An advance copy was provided by Tin House, an imprint of Zando.

THE NIGHT’S TURN

GENRES

Poetry | LGBTQ+

PUBLICATION DATE

September 1, 2026

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as teal rages red
belly boils itself awake
Man sweats into clay

Into Ekphrasis

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Tannahill’s The Living Realm opens amid a sweltering Berlin drought, with the lake Teufelssee presented as a haven distended under both heat and memory.

From the brilliance of its waters, we pivot—rather abruptly—to the delicate art of fisting, taught by the narrator’s female friend across the city’s gay bars and bathhouses at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

While somewhat concussive, this tonal swerve immediately draws us into the work’s central mode of being: humor made to collide with the unbudging bearing of the mundane.

It certainly helps that the Freitags Fisting Club, as it’s aptly named, manages to draw in unsuspecting audiences through the word’s semantic ambiguity. While the effect may vary from reader to reader, its deflation of the work’s initial gravitas is likely to charm most within the first few pages.

Still, Tannahill doesn’t appear to be leaning on humor as ornament. Less concerned with the mechanics of sex itself, he traces the ways pleasure adapts to threats, and how it’s forced to find new routes through a world suddenly made hostile to the body.

The narrative proper begins some thirty years later.

Here, too, sex and pleasure are a constant sheen on the skin, as elemental as the minerals found in sweat. Within Teufelssee’s wilderness, sunbathing and late-night strolls drift into cruising. Sex and the curious sexlessness of nudist beaches intermingle. Bodies meet, separate, and gather again.

The effect is sleepy, maybe even sultry, but far from sluggish. And as the narrator is increasingly poised between the past and present—now that retirement has made space for thoughts’ errant ways—we watch people going about the daily business of being alive through the small pleasures afforded to them.

And perhaps this is where the novel’s deeper unease begins to emerge.

The setting never eases its hold on the narrative, with the friction between the pitiless heat and the wet belly of the lake lending the latter a curious sense of corporeality.

In fact, Teufelssee feels less like a setting than a body of its own, with the narrator even dreaming of being sensed by it at one point. And while the moment inevitably passes, the sensation gains its own distinct pressure.

Strangely, despite the novel’s focus on time and bodily experience, death remains mostly elusive at first. Once it surfaces, it takes on the anguished memory of lovers—and one lover in particular—lost to AIDS, as well as the accumulated weight of Berlin itself.

Here, the author foregrounds the setting in interesting ways.

In a city so saturated with history, war can never fully retreat into absence, serving as a reminder of suffering’s strange dislocation from time. It makes sense, then, that the past isn’t content to remain in the past.

Neither, it seems, do the dead.

As the protagonist begins running into former lovers around the lake, the novel enters its most overtly uncanny territory, though the effect feels more inevitable than startling.

Through Tannahill’s weaving of the narrative, time has already made itself porous enough to suspend disbelief. The living and the dead naturally occupy adjacent spaces, with memory and presence seeping into each other—even going as far as to blur our image of death, understood as the final disembodiment.

The reality pushed onto the narrator’s encounters does hinder the reading pace at times, especially given how forcefully his friends’ reactions pull the story back into an enclosure of the familiar and intelligible.

This leaves the novel swaying between revelation and fear, acknowledging both reality’s grounding in presence and wonder’s utter indifference to it.

That said, we do manage to find our way back to more pressing matters. Where does the body store all the unfinished lives it was once privy to? How does the tongue move once the languages of skin it was once fluent in have become extinct?

Questions like these seem to haunt The Living Realm more wholly than its ghosts.

And as the story ripples outward, it begins to reach for the shores of broader concerns, fascism among them. This farsightedness lends the narrative a certain corpulence, with its many subjects threatening to crowd one another as personal narratives are gradually eroded.

Individual voices do occasionally begin to blur, becoming slightly disembodied within larger currents of communal hardship, but never enough to unsettle the central friend group’s satisfying—and entirely justifiable—personability.

But through all the plot developments, the story’s peculiar relationship with time remains its most distinguishable facet.

The present moment often feels forceful enough to pull the past into itself, and the future seems already present, and therefore already gone. At the same time, knowing and unknowing circle each other restlessly.

Even the syntax is coaxed into participating in this penetrability, with the ending’s run-on sentences slipping into brief streams of consciousness that evoke both orgasm and death.

By the novel’s climax, these two experiences feel decidedly less like metaphors for each other than the same destination approached from different directions, leaving us duly reoriented.

It follows, then, that in its final moments, The Living Realm seems to embody the fragile boundaries separating love from withdrawal, joy from death, the self from the other, and the present from the eternal.

Beneath this, in its drought, aches, penetrations, and long summer days, lies a heady release marked by muted build-up: the suspicion that nothing we’ve ever truly loved leaves us entirely, and that the body holds onto far more than it’s made to renounce.

An advance copy was provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Path of Engagement

Genres

Literary Fiction | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

September 8, 2026

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