Burned By Books

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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) is a collection of ten playfully strange and unsettling stories, some realistic and some surreal. The characters in these pages feel alienated: from their communities and relationships, on the streets of wealthy suburbs, at the doctor's office, in classrooms and swimming pools, in their own homes and their own skin. They wonder: is it better to be alone, imagining the life you want, as fantastic and strange as you wish, or is it better to be in the real world with real people, even if that means you might be hurt, embarrassed, and misunderstood? What if the intensity of it all feels equally threatening and glorious?In these stories, an angry father wishes he could be loving and gentle; a seven-year-old girl wants to be better at school and thin like her sister; an uncoordinated, awkward teenager is training to be an Olympic athlete. What would happen, we are left to wonder, if these characters brought their wild sides out into the light? What if they stopped trying to be normal? Jill Rosenberg is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA Program at the University of Montana. Her fiction has been published by the Kenyon Review, Swamp Pink, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. She currently writes and teaches in Montclair, New Jersey, where she also works with rescued cats and practices practicing Buddhism.Recommended Books:Paul Russell, Sea of TranquilityMargo Steines, BrutalitiesChris Holmes is Professor of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against 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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of “strangers in a strange land” to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he also holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.