Flat Earth - by Anika Jade Levy (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Avery is a young woman attending grad school in New York, working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, in which she was made to take care of her parents, she now seeks to be taken care of--and even infantilized--which she plays out by dating older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation (and possibly hallucination--she had taken a fair amount of Ambien that night) Avery applies for and secures a job at a right wing dating app. The "reports" she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merge with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself on these very pages.

Meanwhile, Avery's best friend Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy family in the South, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary: Flat Earth. Frances' triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world and literati sends Avery on a final tailspin, pushing her to make some of her most devastating decisions, but also ultimately bringing her back to her authentic self.

Flat Earth is a coming-of-age story about America and about New York, a metafictional novel about transactionality, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that's as sharp and ironic as it is sneakily heartbreaking. As Leslie Jamison says, "I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured; wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever."

Review Quotes

About the Author