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

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Literary Fiction | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

September 8, 2026

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The Seduction, a sapphic novel translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, follows the prurient obsession of a thirty-something photographer with a writer in her fifties, a desire both reciprocated and held in restless stasis.

Fittingly, the novel opens with an immediate stratification of focus: there’s the landscape rushing past a train window on one side, a self frozen within desire’s photographed frame on the other.

A few staccato sentences convey compression, a sort of yielding to the spatial demands of a closeness that’s never quite consolidated. Here, the prose seems to strive toward the act of seduction itself, moving in and withdrawing breath through syntax pared to a sharp inhale.

In true poetic fashion, Torres’ language requires us to give something of ourselves to register its effects. The interplay of present and future tenses heightens this sense of undoing, lending the prose a dreamlike quality. Seduction’s tracks begin to shift askew, like a skirt zipped up at the hip in rushed asymmetry.

And yet, what the novel performs isn’t, strictly speaking, desire.

The speaker’s body, enthralled by others’ performance of femininity but averse to its inward machinations, seems to peel away from the mind and its circling thoughts, creating an imbalance between tactility and rumination.

In turn, the central infatuation begins to feel distractedly self-consuming, like someone gnawing at the skin of their arm in fruitless but deepening absorption. Much of the disconnect seems to stem from the writer being repeatedly deidealized aesthetically.

Without the intensity of passion or friendship, the process of projection lends the speaker’s lust a somewhat clinical edge, inevitably recasting it as something closer to fancy than true desire: disembodied, petulant, and driven by a sense of unfulfillment.

This cumulative detachment leaves The Seduction appearing more interested in the idea of satiation than true wanting—nowhere more so than in its treatment of mother–daughter dynamics, literal hunger, the body’s discomforts, and youthful impatience.

In other words, the wanting is less erotic than it is structural, and not at all confined to the speaker’s sexual fixation. At the root of this distancing is an intellectualization of seduction itself, and it’s here that the novel’s ambitions and limitations meet.

Torres is clearly in conversation with Jeanette Winterson and, more explicitly, Roland Barthes, citing A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) as a touchstone. Hence the author’s insistence on pushing theory toward feeling, and abstraction’s compulsion to twist itself sensate.

But where Barthes’ intellectualization of sentiment is grounded in the nonfiction format, Torres’ chosen framing depends heavily on emotion to carry us from one page to the next.

And while feeling can sit beside mental abstraction for a stretch, it can’t afford to lose itself to it completely without losing us as well.

This brings us to the main issue: at its core, The Seduction aspires toward an ideal of completeness that dislocates desire from the body. In doing so, it also distances the body from the idea of a relationship that can hold its shape—an admirable pursuit, though one that inevitably estranges sensation from sentiment.

Torres’ approach certainly allows the novel to engage with heavier themes, such as motherhood’s waywardness and the burdens of the cisgender female body, but it also leaves its central ideas detached from the bones of the plot in a way that renders the characters fleshless.

The result is, naturally, something far too reticent for a work with “seduction” in its name.

Ultimately, the novel isn’t without its appeal, however elusive it may prove, and the narrative is nothing if not nonconformist in its recognition of the strains that keep mind and body separate. Whether it manages to hold the reader is another matter entirely.

An advance copy was provided by Atria/Primero Sueño Press.

Path of Engagement

Genres

Literary Fiction | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

June 2, 2026

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The Summer Boy, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, forces an uneasy confrontation with the consequence of memory, as well as the impulse to give it form.

The story begins with a direct address to the reader, one that carries an early portent of the tragedy to come. That sense of inevitability frames everything that follows, and with the novel’s greatest appeal lying in its grounding in the author’s youth, there’s very little room for pretense.

In many ways, we expect memory’s falsehoods to steer the narrative down perpetual cul-de-sacs.

This expectation is immediately borne out in the novel’s opening scenes, which carry the same touch of hopeful recognition that frames Lie With Me (2017) before the familiar stab of wounded dismay sets in.

From there, Besson moves outward, alternating between the immediacy of present-tense immersion and the sweeping voice of retrospective contemplation. This, in turn, creates the sense of a narrator caught between reliving an experience and attempting to contain it.

Youth, he observes, is ruled by hormones, impulses, and untested freedoms; adulthood, by contrast, is a stilled body and a life fitted around expectation. At times, this contrast heightens our sense of anticipation, giving weight to the uneasy feeling that the central tragedy’s developments have already been set in motion.

At others, it reads more like a wayward distancing, a form of generational commentary that can’t help but flatten the richness of lived experience into clinical observation in service of the speaker’s protestations.

This is felt most keenly when the present is repeatedly depreciated by its communion with technology and distance from the author’s lived point of reference.

That said, Besson’s linguistic minimalism is elegantly precise and unsentimental. The prose’s resistance to reduction through compression can also likely be attributed to Taylor’s nimble translation.

Together, they handle the body with the same economy, stripping and assessing it through sparse recollection. In this register, the skin’s pores and responses are noted rather than savored in a way that speaks credibly to time’s dulling of both longing and impulse.

But dialogue, when it surfaces, carries a strange, self-conscious plasticity. At its most artificial—specifically in the interrogation scene, which forces the protagonists past the final point of naïveté—speech becomes exact and protracted, as if memory were tasked with filling in reality’s opacity with glaring certainty.

In this way, no part of the story is allowed to rest in a shadowed state without being deeply resented for it. The world remains self-consciously poised on the page, completely aware of itself as it awaits being encountered rather than merely considered.

Elsewhere, romantic rivalry is teased and goaded but quickly divested of its guise, serving largely as a source of strain that’s pushed past its limits by fiction’s demand for narrative suspense.

Perhaps the implied intimidation would feel truer if the dynamics among the teen ensemble weren’t quite so fragile. As things stand, their connections are too fresh and undeveloped to bear the weight of meaningful attachment.

This leaves us with identities imposed by projection, wishful thinking, or hazy recollection—distortions forged by the same tension between immediacy and retrospection the rest of the novel leans on, and which in turn renders these connections uncomfortably manufactured.

This instability of projection isn’t confined to relationships alone. The present-tense narrative is continually refracted through the lens of an adult mind, with the distance between the two perspectives undercutting the urgency of Besson’s account.

The world of youth, vivid with boredom but also immeasurable potential, becomes a seemingly gauged landscape in which fear itself is cataloged as abstract, and therefore foreign. But there’s also a reluctant elasticity there, a suggestion of lives and sensations too vast to be fully contained by memory or language.

Hints of this come from the more labored, mature side of the speaker’s consciousness, laying bare the therapeutic significance of the text. But while understandable as an impulse toward closure, this forced intimacy inevitably distances both the author and us from the memory that’s been thinned across the bones of time and consequence.

By the novel’s close, there’s no story as such to resolve, no arc to follow to ground our knee-jerk formation of expectations. Instead, we’re endowed with the remains of a summer past: those ghostly spaces where anticipation, wonder, and disappointment refuse to part.

There’s also the uneasy understanding that our own perception of lived moments is always already filtered, reshaped, and reframed.

And so, The Summer Boy dramatizes more than observes, rehearsing the present’s plunge into the past’s dim, reflective waters. The emotion this evokes may sit uncomfortably close to disillusionment for some, especially with one’s own hopeless longing for the unambiguous.

An advance copy was provided by Scribner.

Path of Engagement

Genres

New Adult | LGBTQ+

Publication Date

May 26, 2026

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up through a red valve
framed by the groan of chafed touch
spilled scrim cups the eye

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You already know that every social situation is a performance. You just don’t think about it in those terms because doing so would make it considerably worse.

Unfortunate timing, then. The four scenarios below have malfunctioned. The usual rules no longer apply. What happens next is, technically, up to you.

Enter the Simulation

System Transcript

The interactive version of this simulation is available via the button above. It takes about five minutes.

Scenario 01: Elevator Malfunction

You step into an elevator with your CEO and your childhood rival. The doors close and the lights flicker. Suddenly, everyone in the elevator can hear one another’s internal monologue out loud. The elevator starts ascending. Painfully slowly.

Aggressive Ambient Noise

You’ve turned yourself into a nature documentary. Nothing wrong with that. If people are too busy tracking the elevator ceiling tiles to notice your inner life unraveling, the strategy is technically working.

This is what Goffman would describe as impression management or defensive face-work, meaning what most people call “absolutely not letting that happen.” The entertaining footnote is that the sheer effort of concealment tends to be more revealing than whatever you were hiding.

Solidarity Gambit

You’ve done the bravest and most socially dangerous thing available to you: told the truth about what’s happening. It either resets the room entirely or makes the remaining twelve floors feel like a geological era.

Goffman would describe this as a form of breaking frame, meaning stepping outside the performance to acknowledge it. It’s a generous move that assumes other people want to be released from the act. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they really, really don’t.

Fully Committed

You’ve decided the solution to an involuntary broadcast is to curate it. Your inner monologue is now a press release. Sounds exhausting, but impressively disciplined.

This is impression management taken somewhere past its logical extreme; the backstage has been folded up and put away. Whether this is a personality trait or a coping mechanism is, perhaps, the same question.

Strategic Incoherence

You’ve made yourself unreadable. It’s an elegant solution; nobody knows what to do with someone who is loudly contemplating whether time exists. The obscure is reliably mistaken for the profound.

Goffman described this as mystification: the deliberate cultivation of inscrutability as a form of social distance. It works. People tend to leave the mysterious alone, partly out of respect and partly out of self-preservation.

Scenario 02: Mirror Reversal

You arrive at a dinner party to find everyone is performing the social role of the person seated to their left. You are between a well-known novelist and a venture capitalist. You are now the venture capitalist.

Method Acting, No Notes

You’ve decided the role is yours now. Mannerisms, vocabulary, ambient confidence...all of it. There’s something almost admirable about the commitment, and something slightly alarming about how quickly you got there.

Goffman argued that this is more or less what the self is: a learned performance, assembled from context and expectation. You’ve just made the process visible. The question he’d leave you with is whether you’ll remember your original lines.

Performing the Performance

You’re playing the venture capitalist while wearing invisible quotation marks. You’re fully present in the role, but somehow also hovering above it, watching yourself do it. That’s a skill. It’s also a very particular kind of exhaustion.

Goffman called this “role distance,” meaning the art of signaling that you’re more than the role you’re currently occupying. It preserves something of yourself, communicates a kind of sophistication, and—if slightly overdone—makes you look like you think you’re too good for the dinner party.

Terms Rejected

You’ve declined the premise. Not the role specifically, but the entire idea that you’re required to perform one. The dinner continues around you like the weather. You sit in it as yourself, which is either principled or very uncomfortable, depending on who you ask.

Goffman believed social situations are held together by a collective willingness to play along. Withdraw that willingness and the whole thing wobbles. It’s a genuine act of disruption. He would also likely note, not unkindly, that it tends to be a lonely one.

Third Option

You’ve played the venture capitalist the way you would play any role: by letting yourself bleed into it until something new comes out the other side. The character that emerges speaks in your cadences but has its own credit history.

Goffman hinted at the fact that skilled social performers don’t just reproduce roles but improvise within them. You’re not refusing the script or following it. Instead, you’re rewriting it in the margins, in real time, which is either creative or deeply disorienting for the novelist on your right.

Scenario 03: Audience Fracture

Mid-presentation, the room splits: half the audience comprises your professional colleagues, the other half your family from fifteen years ago. Both are watching you simultaneously. Your slides remain unchanged.

Simultaneous Broadcast

You’ve accepted the situation and split accordingly: a professional register for the colleagues, something softer and slightly mortifying for the family. You are two people at once, which is, according to Goffman, more or less always true.

We perform different selves for different audiences as a matter of course. What this scenario does is remove the buffer between them. The professional version of you and the fifteen-year-ago version are now in the same room, and neither one is quite comfortable about it.

Selected Audience

You’ve chosen your audience and made everyone else into furniture. Your family is present, but not—for the purposes of this presentation—an audience. It’s a clean solution with the slightly uncomfortable quality of all clean solutions.

Goffman called this “audience segregation,” which refers to the everyday work of keeping different audiences apart so they don’t witness performances meant for someone else. You’ve enforced it without physical separation, which takes a particular kind of focused attention and a willingness to simply not make eye contact with your mother.

Looking for a Third Register

You’re trying to find a version of yourself that can address both rooms at once. In effect, something that belongs to neither performance but isn’t a betrayal of either. It probably doesn’t exist, but you’re looking for it anyway.

Goffman was skeptical. The unified self that can face all audiences simultaneously and remain coherent is, by his account, mostly a fiction we tell ourselves between social situations. You’re conducting the experiment in real time, in front of both your line manager and the person who watched you cry at a school play.

Tactical Evacuation

You’ve decided the most competent thing you can do here is leave. The presentation cannot fail if there is no presentation. There is a kind of genius in this, sitting right next to a kind of cowardice, and it’s genuinely hard to tell them apart.

Goffman understood that abandoning the stage is sometimes the rational move. He would also point out, gently, that the decision to exit is still a performance; it has an audience and communicates something, and everyone in the room is going to talk about it afterward.

Scenario 04: Time-Delay Glitch

On a first date, you discover that everything you say reaches your date on a three-minute delay. Everything they say reaches you instantly. You are, in effect, having a conversation with yourself from three minutes ago.

Pre-Emptive Choreography

You’ve turned the date into a game of three-dimensional chess where one of the players is you from three minutes ago. Every line you say is also a response to something they haven’t heard yet. This is either impressive or deeply romantic, depending on how the evening goes.

Goffman saw interaction as a collaborative performance. This makes it something stranger, where your scene partner is a version of yourself already off-stage. The delay makes visible what’s usually invisible: that we are always, to some extent, managing the impression left by the words we’ve already said.

Outsourced Consequences

You’ve decided past-you can deal with it. You’re going to say things, and in three minutes they will land somewhere; what happens then is a future problem. There’s something philosophically interesting about this, and something that’s going to make for a very strange evening.

This is a direct bet against the Goffmanian premise: that managing how we come across is a necessary and ongoing project. You’re wagering that being genuinely present creates a better impression than any managed version could. Bold. Possibly correct. Very hard to recover from if wrong.

The Glitch as the Date

You’ve made the rupture the subject. Instead of performing around the delay, you’ve handed it to both of you as a thing to examine together, which is either a very sophisticated form of connection or an extremely unusual first date, and possibly both.

Goffman would call this a form of “keying,” meaning taking an existing social frame and deliberately retuning it into something else. Instead of ignoring the constructed nature of the interaction, you’re making it the shared subject. This requires the other person to be game. Not everyone is.

Everything Except Words

You’ve concluded that language, with its three-minute latency, is the problem, and gone around it. Gesture, expression, the particular weight of a pause...all of it arriving in real time, none of it bufferable. It’s a lovely idea. It puts a lot of pressure on your eyebrows.

Goffman discussed what could be called “body idiom,” referring to the communication that happens apart from and around language. You’re relying on it entirely. The signals transmit without delay, which is elegant. They’re also harder to revise than words, which is the trade-off.

Performance Profiles

Each combination of responses produces one of five profiles, drawn from Erving Goffman’s framework for social performance.

The Front-Stage Manager

Across four broken situations, your move was consistently toward control, whether of the frame, signal, or impression. The idea of the unmanaged self making an appearance feels genuinely dangerous to you. You’re very good at this. You’ve had a lot of practice.

Goffman would recognize you immediately, and probably with some warmth. The question he’d likely leave you with is: what’s backstage?

The Frame-Breaker

Your instinct, when the social contract starts showing its stitching, is to point at the seams. You name the performance while giving it. You invite everyone into the awareness that this is all, to some extent, constructed. You do it with enough wit that it reads as insight rather than sabotage. Usually.

Goffman would find you interesting and slightly tiring in equal measure. The cost of always seeing the frame is that you’re never quite fully inside the picture. Whether that feels like freedom or loneliness probably depends on the day.

The Strategic Refuser

When the script breaks, you don’t improvise a new one. You put the script down. You’re not necessarily avoiding the situation, but you are declining its terms. There’s a difference, and you know there’s a difference, which is part of what makes this a position rather than just a response.

Goffman would note, not unsympathetically, that refusal is still a performance. It only registers as disruption because there’s an audience watching. As he’d point out, you’re still on stage. You’ve just chosen a different kind of role within the same theater.

The Reality-Rewriter

You don’t accept situations as they arrive. Each broken scenario became something else in your hands: a different genre, a game, or a character who didn’t exist before you started playing them. This is creative and sometimes genuinely strange to be around.

Goffman would call you an improviser, meaning someone who understands that social roles are structures to play within, not scripts to follow. The risk is that not everyone in the room knows they’re improvising too. The reward is that you occasionally produce something that wasn’t possible before you walked in.

The Adaptive Performer

You didn’t have a consistent strategy, which is probably the most honest result. Different situations pulled different responses: management, refusal, transformation, and sometimes the radical move of just telling the truth about what was happening.

Goffman might say this is the most accurate account of how the self actually works: not a stable entity with a fixed approach, but something assembled on the fly from whatever the situation makes available. The flexibility is real, as is the occasional uncertainty about which version of yourself just showed up.

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

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