Flat Earth - by Anika Jade Levy (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A young woman struggles with the artistic success of her more privileged, beautiful best friend in this ruthless portrait of the New York art scene in which relationships are transactional, men are vampiric, and women have limited time to trade on their youth, beauty, and talent--it's Renata Adler's Speedboat for the Adderall generation

"I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured; wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever." --Leslie Jamison

Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The "white-paper" she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances's triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.

In this generational portrait, attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. Flat Earth is a story of coming of age in America, a novel about commodification, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that's as sharp and sardonic as it is heartbreaking.

Review Quotes

GQ, A Best Book of 2025
W Magazine, A Fall Must-Read
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Library Journal, A Title to Watch

"Anika Jade Levy's Flat Earth exudes ennui and sadness, each chapter prefaced by a mordant precis of bizarre fads and news stories to set against its heroine's apathy and dysfunction . . . There is a glum kind of humour woven into the despair, and the hopelessness is rendered strangely hypnotic in crisp, pitiless prose." --Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"This novel will soon be in the hands of cool girls everywhere . . . [A] glittering satirical tale . . . That 'real America, ' as it happens, is the best bit of this book, described by Levy with dense and gorgeously spiky prose. Rodeos, purity balls, Instagram romance coaches, synthetic opioids, Hyatt hotels, egg-freezing ads, conspiracy theories, Confederate flag bikinis, a Californian town called East Jesus, '9/11-themed slot machines' where 'airplanes crashed into the twin towers and exploded every time you hit a triple'--it's all jammed in there . . . Flat Earth is a deliciously accurate description of how life looks at 26-and-a-half . . . The novel is light on plot and heavy on vibes, but fortunately those vibes are meaty, juicy and tantalizingly zeitgeisty." --Ceci Browning, The Sunday Times (London)

"Not to be missed if you want to keep up with the literary zeitgeist." --GQ

"Startling clarity, cynical wit, and an intellectual rigor rooted in a yearning for connection." --Emmeline Clein, Cultured Magazine

"Anika is one of our favorite writers and we can't recommend her brilliant debut enough . . . A sharp, very now novel about being young and hungry (physically, spiritually, etc.) in downtown New York City." --Language Arts

"Anika Levy's debut novel Flat Earth will capture our attention, at least for as long as our warped attention spans will allow it. Conjuring the ennui that defines the current age, Levy tells the story of two friends, their sameness, and their differences: differences in class, in ambition, in success, in ability, and the desperation that can come from growing older, and being forced to face one's own reality. No matter what changes in generations, no matter the specific difficulties that young people must contend with in the face of technology, war, politics, environmental devastation: nothing will change the heartbreak and fraught intimacy of female friendship in its ups and downs." --Julia Hass, Literary Hub

"Levy debuts with a darkly funny work of hyperrealism . . . Pitch-perfect humor . . . The novel never loses the fierceness of its gaze. It's an astute and audacious satire." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Brilliant . . . In Avery's narrative voice, Levy has achieved a fantastic yet paradoxical triumph: It's a voice that manages to carry intimations as acerbic as they are full of longing, as strident as they are vulnerable, and as tart as they are unguarded . . . With her own hyperarticulate, stimulant-driven style, Avery (and Levy behind her) runs into her own life, helter-skelter, as if it were a door she'd forgotten to open. You'll want to keep reading just to see what she says next. Levy's utterly original sendup of contemporary life seems destined to become a cult classic." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Levy's prose is rich in style and sharp with punch lines . . . Both a mirror and crystal ball, Flat Earth is for readers not afraid of looking deeply into society's ills and perhaps finding parts of themselves there." --Booklist

"In this serious, unusual, and sometimes hilarious dissection of the contemporary, Levy sheds euphemisms and platitudes, and gets to the heart of what matters now." --Lynne Tillman

"Acerbic, innovative, and achingly now. Every page hums with specificity, scene-obliterating observations, and deeply wrought emotional stakes that add up to a novel at once timeless and timely." --Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica

"Reading Flat Earth feels like opening your best friend's diary and finding out what she really thinks about you, and then falling even more in love with her--realizing that love is something darker and more consuming than you'd let yourself believe. Flat Earth is fierce, hungry, hurting, on fire. The prose in this book makes other books feel like dull knives. This is a book about friendship and imperfect care--about the ways we love not despite but through our brokenness, because it's what we have. I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured--wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever." --Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams

"Flat Earth is delivered in the calm, deliberate style of a great work of art which has always existed and is only now being uncovered, an especially impressive quality given that it concerns itself with the end of girlhood which is to say the end of the world. A novel to be torn through and passed around and treasured." --Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings

"If Mary Gaitskill and Renata Adler spent a weekend collaborating on a sequel to Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, maybe you'd have some precedent for Flat Earth. Anika Jade Levy's razor-thin, razor-sharp debut novel is unlike anything I've ever read before. In fragments that blaze like iPhone faces in dark bedrooms at 3:00 a.m., Flat Earth captures a zeitgeist from its daily ephemera to its unhinged gestalt, transmuting the mess into a brilliant, visceral, funny, provocative, resonant, essential work of art." --Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

"Anika Jade Levy is the voice of her generation, a voice that is searching, scalding, funny, and tragic all at once. Flat Earth is a novel of friendship and coming of age, a story of New York City and a story of America, and, above all, a story of the superpowers and pitfalls of femininity. This conspiratorial, poetic, and cool debut is a future cult classic from a literary rockstar." --Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

"Flat Earth is like a walking tour through one of the hells of the present--a visionary satire, bitterly funny with traces of sweetness. I couldn't stop reading it." --Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

"Anika Jade Levy's mordantly brilliant debut is by turns a searching portrait of friendship, a blazing social satire, an intelligence briefing from the Ministry of New Things, and perhaps finally an anti-heroine's quest to lose, or at least complicate, her prefix. We all must read to the edge of Flat Earth, even at the risk of a grievous plummet." --Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask, Venus Drive, and No One Left to Come Looking for You

"In a city that eternally produces young, hot, smart, special girls with curatorial-level taste and then discards them when they've aged out of the proverbial pleated skirt, even the most delusional woman's sense of uniqueness and superiority can begin to falter. Unless they manage to produce something aesthetically or culturally relevant that garners attention, fame, and money, these girls fear they may be on the chopping block next--if not today, whenever their amphetamine and Wellbutrin prescriptions run dry." --Jen George, author of The Babysitter at Rest

About the Author

ANIKA JADE LEVY is a writer from Colorado. She is a founding editor of Forever Magazine and teaches in the Writing program at Pratt Institute. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in Interview Magazine, Nylon, Flaunt, Grand, and elsewhere. Flat Earth is her first book.