The Art of Being 26

Is there anybody more desperate than a 26-year-old who wants to be an artist?

This is the question Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel Flat Earth, out now from Catapult, strives to answer. It follows Avery, a graduate student and aspiring writer at an elite institution who pays her tuition by working for a right wing dating app and having sex with wealthy men.. She snorts stimulants, makes a blood pact with the glass of her broken phone screen, and nurses jealousy over her wealthy, more successful best friend Frances, who, over the course of a single year, makes a successful documentary about conspiracy theorists in rural America, gets married, and becomes pregnant. It’s a lean novel of bone-dry prose that is best relished on a sentence level: “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable? Like galleries.” Levy writes. Reminiscent of the wry reportage of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and the moving metafiction of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Flat Earth is a very now New York novel that in its palpitating heart is about a young woman determined, at all costs, to remain porous.