My First Book

Reviews

“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

“Levy channels the blitzkrieg of contradictory micro-observations we absorb from social media, video games, and doomscrolling to create the absurd, incomprehensible cacophony that anyone born after 1997 had to grow up enduring . . . [In “Internet Girl”] Levy's portrayal of her narrator's interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible . . . [In “Love Story”] Levy poignantly captures the girl's vulnerability . . . Levy smartly skewers late capitalism in "Halloween Forever.” . . . A unique blend of the satirical and the poignant.” —NPR

“Inventive, beautifully written, expressive of its generation, and worthy of the attention it has garnered. . . . the energy and beauty of Levy’s style brings in something new. She has created something unique: an internet language in which to speak of the internet.” —Compact Magazine

“Levy’s business is dowsing for truth in a frantic modernity, where sensations once bodily and sufferable, like love and longing, are filtered away into digital sediment and inscrutable signifiers. . . . Levy writes in her own referential language, a lightspeed style that must be post-post-post modern. . . . it’s a strange language for a strange epoch.” —The Guardian

“A premier voice of a new generation of writers . . . Levy’s vulnerability and insightful reflections on growing up online are what made this for me and shine through.” —Electric Lit

“In near-superb proportion, Levy draws from Woolf’s melancholia, Sylvia Plath’s existential dread, and Didion’s early adulthood sentimentality to extract some very cold but relevant truths about the society in which we live in and the next generation of leaders. It’s easy to predict a future in which literary nerds, aspiring writers, sociologists, and culturally curious individuals will come across My First Book and find the holistic emotional truth about this zeitgeist that most novels, movies, or other artistic endeavors might get blisteringly wrong.” —On the Seawall

“Captures the Gen Z experience . . . like reading a foreign language that I didn’t know I grew up speaking.” —Michigan Daily

“Experimental and creative . . . A fascinating take on Gen Z life, lived online.” —Booklist

“Crackling debut collection . . . Levy shines when capturing her characters’ existential dread . . . Levy announces herself as an astute interpreter of Zoomer culture.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book defies definition . . . Oddly exquisite.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“My First Book manages to somehow be based, redpilled, woke, cringe, and, above all else, brilliant all at the same time. (And if you’re not a zoomer, it’ll define some of that terminally online vocabulary for you.) Finally, my generation has a voice to be proud of.” —Brock Colyar, winner of the American Society of Magazine Editors Next Award
 
“Fractal stories from the eschatological present, told in a strange, new, manic, and flarfy voice that I trust and endorse.” —Tao Lin, author of Leave Society
 
“Nobody writes like Honor Levy. My First Book is brutal and feminine, dreamlike and fantastic. I relished every word.” —Cat Marnell, author of How To Murder Your Life Expand reviews