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.

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In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees as a link to the country of her origins, Sabina attempts to befriend the family’s son, Khalil, and is rebuffed for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Yet as the twins and Khalil come of age, they are drawn into a tense and ever-shifting triangular dynamic. As Sabina strives to find her father and make sense of her mother, as Camilla confronts whether the power she held in youth translates to adulthood, and as Khalil reckons with the psychological fallout of a family tragedy, their paths converge in ways both surprising and inevitable. Bookended by events with global resonance, Mistranslation (U Iowa Press, 2026) is a continent-spanning chronicle of family, inheritance, and the reverberations of the choices we do—or don’t—make.

Madeleine Moss grew up in Ithaca, New York, and holds a degree in French literature from Cornell University. She received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and currently lives in Strasbourg, France.

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“I hear whispers: Have you seen her? The woman who is not a woman, she is a walking museum. Have you seen her wares?”

The narrator of SL Carroll’s radiant debut leads an empty life in a small town until she is employed to catalogue the Museum's collection. She has never seen anyone rewrite their bones the way the Museum has, until they are hardly bones at all. Obsession takes hold and the Museum's display case body inhabits her mind. In an attempt to duplicate the Museum's existence, the narrator secretly begins collecting objects of her own. Can she curate an authentic collection, balancing her own desires with her increasing responsibilities to the Museum?

The Art of Conjuring (Terrazzo Editions, 2026) is a lyric and whimsical novella that probes the boundaries of femininity, friendship, and the fine line between obsession and inspiration.

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