My First Book

De: Honor Levy

Narrado por: Honor Levy

“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

The magnetic debut collection from author Honor Levy, now with an additional story for the paperback edition

My First Book marked the arrival of an undeniable new talent, emerging from the chaos of Gen Z coming-of-age and written in what The Guardian called “a strange language for a strange epoch.” As the collection shows, the short story may be the ideal form to process and reflect our current era. Each story is a mirrorball onto the world as it is: panicky, uncertain, often hilarious, and ultimately sincere. Honor Levy's protagonists discover the infinite nature of love and wonder at mystical linguistic creation processes, but they also stand defeated outside of parties, getting rained on, and fall into the black glass of screen after screen.

To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?

©2024 Honor Levy (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“My First Book is a rainbow grenade . . . Levy’s strength is her style: energetic, funny, with a forlorn sweetness and innocence . . . The stories revel in incongruity . . . [Levy] appears to be clowning on the world and herself in equal measure.” –New Yorker

“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

Cool beans

Whoever wrote this is pretty darn good at putting words together. They should write a book