A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Good Morning America, W, Nylon, SheReads, and LitHub
“We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy . . . does so with special bite and élan.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
From groundbreaking debut author Honor Levy, stories to delight and ensnare
Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book marks the arrival of an electric new talent. Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in Generation Z. Never far from a digital interface, her characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched society on the brink of collapse.
Inventive, ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. One protagonist accompanies a girl with too many teeth through an abortion, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, a third reminisces about other sunsets that were “pinker, like way pinker,” and another encounters God in a downtown arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?
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"We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in My First Book, a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan. . . . Reading Levy is what it must have felt like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s . . . In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. . . . What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness . . . Is a hot take a stab at being found? Levy can dispense these as well as anyone. Crucially, though, she understands that ‘a hot take won’t keep you warm at night.’"
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Experimental and creative . . . A fascinating take on Gen Z life, lived online.
— BooklistThis book defies definition . . . Oddly exquisite.
— Kirkus (starred review)Fractal stories from the eschatological present, told in a strange, new, manic, and flarfy voice that I trust and endorse.
— Tao Lin, author of Leave SocietyMy First Book manages to somehow be based, redpilled, woke, cringe, and, above all else, brilliant all at the same time. (And if you’re not a zoomer, it’ll define some of that terminally online vocabulary for you.) Finally, my generation has a voice to be proud of.
— Brock Colyar, winner of the American Society of Magazine Editors Next Award“Fractal stories from the eschatological present, told in a strange, new, manic, and flarfy voice that I trust and endorse.
— Tao Lin, author of Leave Society“Nobody writes like Honor Levy.
“Nobody writes like Honor Levy. My First Book is brutal and feminine, dreamlike and fantastic. I relished every word.
— Cat Marnell, author of How To Murder Your LifeThis book defies definition . . . Oddly exquisite.
— Kirkus (starred review)“Nobody writes like Honor Levy. My First Book is brutal and feminine, dreamlike and fantastic. I relished every word.
— Cat Marnell, author of How To Murder Your LifeCrackling debut collection . . . Levy shines when capturing her characters’ existential dread . . . Levy announces herself as an astute interpreter of Zoomer culture.
— Publishers WeeklyMost anticipated by Good Morning America, LitHub, and W
A premier voice of a new generation of writers . . . Levy’s vulnerability and insightful reflections on growing up online are what made this for me and shine through.
— Electric LitCaptures the Gen Z experience . . . like reading a foreign language that I didn’t know I grew up speaking.
— Michigan DailyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!