My First Book
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'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.
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.
