My First Book
Published on 23. May 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-80351-080-4 (ISBN)
Description
"I am not asking you to agree with me. In fact, I'd be happier if you didn't. I am afraid of self-censorship in a place of supposed radicalism like a liberal arts school because I am afraid that one day we will all be too afraid of being wrong."
We grew up on the internet, or the Internet, as it was originally known - a proper noun, a place to visit and explore, before we claimed it as everybody's, turning it into a place where we pay bills, shop, fall in love, where kids get past parental controls to come of age. Honor Levy lends her experience to the narrators of these propulsive, provocative and pill-fuelled dispatches, speaking to the malleable reality we all inhabit, where clicks, codes, unreliable words and memes shape identities, personas and reputations.
In My First Book, Honor Levy endeavors to contextualize Gen-Z, a generation of young people desperate to discern what matters in a world that paints every event as a catastrophe. Irony is the salve of choice, and Levy deploys it masterfully. She paints the chasm in understanding between her parents' generation and the Zoomer reality overloaded with niche signs and meanings.
We grew up on the internet, or the Internet, as it was originally known - a proper noun, a place to visit and explore, before we claimed it as everybody's, turning it into a place where we pay bills, shop, fall in love, where kids get past parental controls to come of age. Honor Levy lends her experience to the narrators of these propulsive, provocative and pill-fuelled dispatches, speaking to the malleable reality we all inhabit, where clicks, codes, unreliable words and memes shape identities, personas and reputations.
In My First Book, Honor Levy endeavors to contextualize Gen-Z, a generation of young people desperate to discern what matters in a world that paints every event as a catastrophe. Irony is the salve of choice, and Levy deploys it masterfully. She paints the chasm in understanding between her parents' generation and the Zoomer reality overloaded with niche signs and meanings.
Reviews / Votes
Fractal stories from the eschatological present, told in a strange, new, manic, and flarfy voice that I trust and endorse -- Tao Lin Levy negotiates the great wave of information overload with a deceptively effortless grace... So funny and sharp, the kind of characters you either want to scream at or buy a drink... Beautifully, intoxicatingly written, and somehow so knowing that it comes full circle to a hard-won wisdom and compassion. Exhilarating, and as significant a definition of a cultural era and its disaffected main players as Generation X was in its time -- Luke Kennard Self-referential, unhinged and ultimately transfixing... Very funny... It's not unlike having a series of internet tabs rapidly opened in your brain * Literary Review * Levy writes in her own referential language, a lightspeed style that must be post-post-post modern... a true historian of the web * Guardian * Hyperactive, hyper-ironic and full of "hyper-specific signifiers"... Fun, light-hearted and genuinely new * Sunday Times * A series of bulletins from the frontier of extreme youth... Dizzying * Financial Times * Levy's flash fiction tales are manic and essayistic, employing a fragmentary mode...and an Urban Dictionary-esque vernacular to explore topics across gender, cringe, politics; plus the existential chaos consequent of these things combined with our ever-looming, anthroposcenic reality... Provocative and poetic...humorous and enjoyably surreal * AnOther *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
240 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80351-080-4 (9781803510804)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
New editions
Person
Honor Levy is a writer from California. She graduated from Bennington College in 2020. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant. Her story 'Good Boys' will appear in the forthcoming anthology Flash Fiction America. She has been written about in the New York Times and profiled in The Face. Though she has not published a book, she already has a cult following due to online stories published and her podcast (with Walter Pearce), Wet Brain.