My First Book
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My First Book
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Narrated by:
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Honor Levy
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Written by:
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Honor Levy
About this listen
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
Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book marks the arrival of an electric new talent. Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in Generation Z. Never far from a digital interface, her characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched society on the brink of collapse.
Inventive, ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. One protagonist accompanies a girl with too many teeth through an abortion, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, a third reminisces about other sunsets that were “pinker, like way pinker,” and another encounters God in a downtown arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?
©2024 Honor Levy (P)2024 Penguin AudioWhat the critics say
“We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in My First Book, a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan. . . . Reading Levy is what it must have felt like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s . . . In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. . . . What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness . . . Is a hot take a stab at being found? Levy can dispense these as well as anyone. Crucially, though, she understands that ‘a hot take won’t keep you warm at night.’”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“What makes Honor Levy the voice of a generation is her ability to take all those floating signifiers and dead metaphors, all these junk-bits of content rendered inert by their repetition—on Reddit, on Tumblr, in Shakespeare—and give them new life; in other words, meaning. And she makes it look easy! At their best, Levy’s sentences hopscotch through intricate sequences of signs with perfect control and infectious glee; all you want to do is sit back and watch them play. . . . Levy knows we’re so lucky to see ‘all of the ends and the beginnings beginning and ending and beginning and ending and beginning and ending infinitely.’ And our generation is lucky to have a voice that gives us a happy ending, or, at least, a happy way to end. <3”—The Paris Review
“Sincerity, delicately spun . . . can often begin to build toward a feeling not unlike meditation or prayer . . . Levy is able to trace something meaningful in the absurd constellation of online stimulation. At her best, she commits to a disciplined, braided lyricism where, like distant cosmological objects on the same elliptical path, the contents of her choosing—whether German Renaissance painters, Xanax, cancellations, or God—all begin converging inward, first slowly, then breathlessly, until finally they reach a terminal momentum from which your attention cannot be extracted until their moment of contact, a whimsical eruption of the inexplicable kind.”—The Los Angeles Review of Books