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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.
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.
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"Levy debuts with a darkly funny work of hyperrealism ... Pitch-perfect humor ... The novel never loses the fierceness of its gaze. It's an astute and audacious satire." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Brilliant ... In Avery's narrative voice, Levy has achieved a fantastic yet paradoxical triumph: It's a voice that manages to carry intimations as acerbic as they are full of longing, as strident as they are vulnerable, and as tart as they are unguarded ... You'll want to keep reading just to see what she says next. Levy's utterly original sendup of contemporary life seems destined to become a cult classic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Levy's prose is rich in style and sharp with punch lines ... Both a mirror and crystal ball, Flat Earth is for readers not afraid of looking deeply into society's ills and perhaps finding parts of themselves there." —Booklist
"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
This information about Flat Earth was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anika Jade Levy is a writer from Colorado. She is a founding editor of Forever Magazine and teaches in the Writing program at Pratt Institute. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in Interview Magazine, Nylon, Flaunt, Grand, and elsewhere. Flat Earth is her first book.
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