Show Notes
Her clothes shredded and disrobed by her own teeth, Lucy finds herself draped over a high tree branch in the quad of her college, naked but unafraid, a wild leopard more than any humankind. So begins Emeline Atwood’s starling debut novel, A Real Animal (Catapult, 2026). We know early on that Lucy will never be able to reach back to that precise feeling of being the leopard, powerful and at one with the natural world. Instead, she will swim in the harsher waters of a society that scorns and shames her, that seems to revel in her abuse, with a family that would prefer that she silence herself.
A Real Animal exists in a tremorous first person, the reader watching through Lucy’s eyes her attempts at intimate partnerships, with good men, horrible men, indifferent men, each relationship cast off or dissolved by the incoherence of her interior life. In sexual dramas for which she is but a prop, and family spectacles that treat her like so much wallpaper, Lucy seeks an experience of life that abandons performance for something like the sensuousness of the imminent now.
A bildungsroman that throws redemption and assimilation on the trash heap, A Real Animal does what the Russian Formalists hoped literature would do: it shakes you awake and rejects the comforts of your habitual life in favor of something as friction-full as a dirty razor. The waves come hard, and you can but experience the drowning.
Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T, Hooper Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. A Real Animal was just shortlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize for a debut novel.
More from New Books in Literature
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When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.
Sharma and Sushila were ahead of their time in marrying for love and across castes in early 1950s India. When their oldest daughter is nine, they leave their home and family for Sharma to take an academic position in astrophysics in America. Sushila takes care of their home, raises their girls, manages to complete a doctorate, and becomes a feminist philosopher. The three daughters grow into young women, each navigating school and community during the upheaval of the 1960s. While coming to terms with their parents’ flaws and building relationships and lives, they learn to count on each other through marriage and divorce, children and careers. Sutra Americana (U Wisconsin Press, 2026) is a sweeping and beautiful immigrant saga about identity, memory, forgiveness, and love.
Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power.
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Fischer Guy about her novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).