Book Description
A young woman struggles with the artistic success of her more privileged, beautiful best friend in this ruthless portrait of the New York art scene in which relationships are transactional, men are vampiric, and women have limited time to trade on their youth, beauty, and talent—it’s Renata Adler’s Speedboat for the Adderall generation
“I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured; wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever.” —Leslie Jamison
Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The “white-paper” she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel.
Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances’s triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.
In this generational portrait, attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. Flat Earth is a story of coming of age in America, a novel about commodification, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that’s as sharp and sardonic as it is heartbreaking.
Praise For This Book
Library Journal, A Title to Watch“In this serious, unusual, and sometimes hilarious dissection of the contemporary, Levy sheds euphemisms and platitudes, and gets to the heart of what matters now.” —Lynne Tillman
“Acerbic, innovative, and achingly now. Every page hums with specificity, scene-obliterating observations, and deeply wrought emotional stakes that add up to a novel at once timeless and timely.” —Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica
“Reading Flat Earth feels like opening your best friend’s diary and finding out what she really thinks about you, and then falling even more in love with her—realizing that love is something darker and more consuming than you’d let yourself believe. Flat Earth is fierce, hungry, hurting, on fire. The prose in this book makes other books feel like dull knives. This is a book about friendship and imperfect care—about the ways we love not despite but through our brokenness, because it’s what we have. I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured—wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever.” —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams
“Flat Earth is delivered in the calm, deliberate style of a great work of art which has always existed and is only now being uncovered, an especially impressive quality given that it concerns itself with the end of girlhood which is to say the end of the world. A novel to be torn through and passed around and treasured.” —Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings
“If Mary Gaitskill and Renata Adler spent a weekend collaborating on a sequel to Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, maybe you’d have some precedent for Flat Earth. Anika Jade Levy’s razor-thin, razor-sharp debut novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. In fragments that blaze like iPhone faces in dark bedrooms at 3:00 a.m., Flat Earth captures a zeitgeist from its daily ephemera to its unhinged gestalt, transmuting the mess into a brilliant, visceral, funny, provocative, resonant, essential work of art.” —Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
“Anika Jade Levy is the voice of her generation, a voice that is searching, scalding, funny, and tragic all at once. Flat Earth is a novel of friendship and coming of age, a story of New York City and a story of America, and, above all, a story of the superpowers and pitfalls of femininity. This conspiratorial, poetic, and cool debut is a future cult classic from a literary rockstar.” —Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells
“Anika Jade Levy’s mordantly brilliant debut is by turns a searching portrait of friendship, a blazing social satire, an intelligence briefing from the Ministry of New Things, and perhaps finally an anti-heroine’s quest to lose, or at least complicate, her prefix. We all must read to the edge of Flat Earth, even at the risk of a grievous plummet.” —Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask, Venus Drive, and No One Left to Come Looking for You
“In a city that eternally produces young, hot, smart, special girls with curatorial-level taste and then discards them when they’ve aged out of the proverbial pleated skirt, even the most delusional woman’s sense of uniqueness and superiority can begin to falter. Unless they manage to produce something aesthetically or culturally relevant that garners attention, fame, and money, these girls fear they may be on the chopping block next—if not today, whenever their amphetamine and Wellbutrin prescriptions run dry.” —Jen George, author of The Babysitter at Rest
