Oct 12, 2026

A Real Animal

Emeline Atwood

Hosted by Chris Holmes

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Summary

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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Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes is Professor of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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