My First Book
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Granta Books
Publishing:5th Jun '25
£9.99
This title is due to be published on 5th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Startling, provocative stories that grapple with the online reality we all inhabit, where clicks, codes and memes shape identities, personas and reputations.
'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.
'Self-referential, unhinged and ultimately transfixing... Very funny... It's not unlike having a series of internet tabs rapidly opened in your brain' * Literary Review *
'A series of bulletins from the frontier of extreme youth... Dizzying' * Financial Times *
'Hyperactive, hyper-ironic and full of "hyper-specific signifiers"... Fun, light-hearted and genuinely new' * Sunday Times *
'Levy writes in her own referential language, a lightspeed style that must be post-post-post modern... a true historian of the web' * Guardian *
'Fractal stories from the eschatological present, told in a strange, new, manic, and flarfy voice that I trust and endorse' -- Tao Lin
'Levy negotiates the great wave of information overload with a deceptively effortless grace... So funny and sharp, the kind of characters you either want to scream at or buy a drink... Beautifully, intoxicatingly written, and somehow so knowing that it comes full circle to a hard-won wisdom and compassion. Exhilarating, and as significant a definition of a cultural era and its disaffected main players as Generation X was in its time' -- Luke Kennard
'Levy's flash fiction tales are manic and essayistic, employing a fragmentary mode...and an Urban Dictionary-esque vernacular to explore topics across gender, cringe, politics; plus the existential chaos consequent of these things combined with our ever-looming, anthroposcenic reality... Provocative and poetic...humorous and enjoyably surreal' * AnOther *
'A series of high-energy tales... Levy rolls her eyes at her own cliches, and her writing thrums with punk energy, full of internet-speak, pithy phrasing and the sort of shocking opinions that would get her "cancelled" - if she weren't courting it with glee... In a year when the older writers stuck to familiar scripts, it was bracing to see younger ones, as Bret Easton Ellis did 40 years ago, rip them up and remix them with style' * Telegraph *
ISBN: 9781803510811
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages