My First Book
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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
My First Book marked the arrival of an undeniable new talent, emerging from the chaos of Gen Z coming-of-age and written in what The Guardian called “a strange language for a strange epoch.” As the collection shows, the short story may be the ideal form to process and reflect our current era. Each story is a mirrorball onto the world as it is: panicky, uncertain, often hilarious, and ultimately sincere. Honor Levy’s protagonists discover the infinite nature of love and wonder at mystical linguistic creation processes, but they also stand defeated outside of parties, getting rained on, and fall into the black glass of screen after screen.
To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in Levy's crackling debut collection gleefully mix high and low culture and brim with youthful wisdom. The characters in "Love Story" are sketched with terms from ancient history and the internet: "He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu." In "Z Was for Zoomer," which is framed as a glossary of Gen Z slang ("Fail" means "to mess up big time... to get hurt, to fall, to break, to destroy"), Levy expresses nostalgia for a time before the niche humor of memes ("We even make memes about this, our failure to understand anything but memes"). "Pillow Angels" chronicles the exploits of four high school best friends in Los Angeles who get nose jobs, use cocaine, and turn a bathroom into a "Roman vomitorium." Some of the cultural descriptions feel perfunctory, but Levy shines when capturing her characters' existential dread, as in "Written by Sad Girl in the Third Person": "She wants a cigarette or an agent... or peace in the Middle East... or to be no one or to be someone." Levy announces herself as an astute interpreter of Zoomer culture. Agents: Abbie Walters and Mollie Glick, CAA.
