Anika Jade Levy is the founding editor of Forever Magazine and a contributor to zeitgeisty publications such as Nylon and Flaunt. In Flat Earth, her debut novel, she has given amusing and often unflattering expression to a type that many readers of her journalism will recognise. Avery, the narrator, is hooked on Adderall, obsessed with thinness and prone to drinking wine (unfiltered, of course) from the bottle. She swallows gum, showers without soap and frequently laments her fading youth (she’s twenty-six). Enrolled as a postgraduate student in a media studies department in New York, Avery spends most of her time drifting from one transactional sexual encounter to another and nursing envy about her best friend, Frances, for whom success in love and work seems to come easily. Levy’s novel, which unfolds in witty, nihilistic fragments, is devoted to satirising the spiritual impoverishment of Avery and her circle. 

Avery is sharp, ironic and committed to the idea that her life is a wreck. She also can’t help but imagine the ways this might be turned to her advantage. Confronted with the possibility of a worrying medical diagnosis, she muses, ‘If I had endometriosis, that meant I might never be able to have a baby. On the other hand, maybe I could write about my diagnosis for a feminist magazine.’ After sleeping with a man so that she can demand of him the two thousand dollars she needs for a tuition fee payment, she considers, ‘If I lie about my age, I could do this for a few more years.’ She thinks about her relationships and uncertain future in terms of cold calculations about money in, money out. Broke and lusting after cash, Avery doesn’t exactly lack an ‘inner life’, as she fears, but prizes shallow attainments over true connection. She is obsessed with the discrepancy between her bank balance, which lurks in the double digits, and that of Frances, who has the kind of wealth that ‘eliminates friction’ and ‘causes money to take on a sublime and fictional quality’.

Speaking to Nylon about Forever Magazine in 2024, Levy described the publication’s worldview as ‘wanting to be really wide-eyed, but also embracing the utter cultural, institutional and material decay’. Flat Earth exemplifies this. Returning to her Manhattan apartment one day, Avery passes a ‘pile of dogshit the size of a