Flat Earth
- Author: Anika Jade Levy (United States)
- Book type: American novel
- Publisher: Catapult
- Released: 4 November, 2025
- Length: 224 pages
- Format: hardback / ebook
- Prize: € 26.00
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Anika Jade Levy Flat Earth review
- “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)
- “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)
- “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)
- “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)
Blurb of the Anika Jade Levy novel
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.
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.
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.