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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
"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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Witty and poignant . . . Funny and sharp . . . The book effectively portrays the psychology of young women who are chronically online . . . There is a layer of sadness under the flat surface, not quite accessible. This tension is ultimately where the novel succeeds in being beautiful. Levy is good at keeping the feeling out of reach." - Erin Somers
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Witty and poignant . . . Funny and sharp . . . The book effectively portrays the psychology of young women who are chronically online . . . There is a layer of sadness under the flat surface, not quite accessible. This tension is ultimately where the novel succeeds in being beautiful. Levy is good at keeping the feeling out of reach." - Erin Somers
"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
"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
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