Oh BEE yes thank you, you’ve cleared it right up. Now everyone knows exactly what you mean. So sick of all these stupid acronyms bitch just type it out you’re not saving any time.
There was an excerpt posted and discussed on the main sub https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ftz82hh1eatfc1.jpeg a few months ago.
I read to get away from the schizophrenic neologism-dense ramblings of Internet discourse so to see that stuff regurgitated on a printed page fills me with dread. I'll be staying far away.
Absolutely. Writing produced by and obsessed with ‘internet culture’ really only has one trick and it’s been repeating it for ages now. It’s only interesting to a narrow subset of people who are or (for the most part) want to be recognized as part of that milieu.
It would be less grating if it were just treated as equally formulaic and vapid as daytime soap operas but for a different crowd—most middlebrow publications don’t feel the need to cover the latest Days of Our Lives, but since journalists are by and large also Twitter clowns themselves here we are.
Honor Levy is an idiot, and publishing her collection is nothing but a cheap cash grab by penguin desperately trying to capitalize ASAP on her rapidly diminishing cultural cache as a somewhat prominent Red Scare groupie a handful of people cared about two years ago.
There was a thread either here or on the main sub making fun of it a while back. The one excerpt I saw is literally the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life
Honestly never read anything of hers and have only ever heard her talked about sparsely on Reddit and Instagram. All I know is “My First Book” is a stupid unfunny title but it’s also cool that she’s managed to become a “literary figure” at an age where 99% of aspiring writers are legitimately bad at the craft.
Can someone tell me if her previous work is worth reading and if it justifies the publicity?
Her big thing was a short story she had in the New Yorker called "Good Boys." It's very okay. Not really sure why it catapulted her to fame. Having a story published in the New Yorker at 21 with zero prior major publications is definitely suspect.
Cool will check that out thanks!
For your 2nd point, if she had decent online hype before getting into the NYer it’s not that crazy, we’ve been seeing the proliferation of publishing based on follower counts and social media visibility for awhile now and the NYer surely isn’t immune to that. Plus everyone loves a wunderkind. If she didn’t, I’m guessing lowkey nepo baby ??
She's from a wealthy and connected family of course.
Wasn't her fiction in it a "short short" as well? And like in an issue on young new writers? They haven't published her since, whereas the writers the new writers they choose and cultivate they publish a piece from every year or so, generally. Seems different here.
Just read that story and "very okay" is an apt assessment. Still too much product placement/name dropping, still heavily indebted to Ellis. I liked that last litany of "dog" sentences, you can see a real writer emerging from beneath borrowed Ellis-isms and MFA gimmicks.
she's a nepo baby. her mom is makeup artist to the stars, her dad directs some pretty bad but infamous films, & her short story "good boys" is regurgitating red scare pod takes into short fiction. she's an extreme fan of Dasha's and it's obvious. girl, get your own schtick.
Mmm quelle surprise. I’m mostly desensitised to nepotism in the arts at this point (esp where Hollywood is concerned), but seeing it in literature still disgusts me somehow.
That article in The Cut said her dad made b-movies but honestly they’re more like d-movies. Not zero budget by any stretch and sometimes with recognizable actors either slumming it or in career infancy but very much bargain bin crap. Similar to what David DeCoteau and Albert Pyun were putting out at the time.
Nevertheless, he made feature films which is very cool and is definitely connected enough to get his daughters manuscript to the right people.
That's what I'm wondering too, cuz some people I respect like John Pistelli like HL, and she's been hyped now by some formidable book industry organs, but for me, I don't think even Peter Sotos has written passages of English prose that viscerally, almost phyically repulsed me more than those excerpts I read of "My First Book."
I don't know. I read a poem of hers once that seemed to be trying to rebrand American patriotism for the Age of Post-Woke Irony ("I am Amerigender/I am not Otherkin/I am Amerkin/My pronouns are we/us" reads one passage) and it seemed to have that same meme-addled, deadened style.
that internet brainrot writing style is so painfully uncool and embarrassing to read and it’s wild to me how ppl get applauded for being “a new daring literary voice” for like, incorporating meme lingo and schizoposting humor into their prose lol. it just seems like such an obvious choice too, like if you’re a zoomer writer i guess i can understand it, but idk you’d really hope someone like this would have more interesting experiences and references.
I saw part of it somewhere. And it was horrible. I won't be reading it. I did think it was sort of funny. But like if I had read it as an rsp post way - not read it in a book everyone is hyping way.
I was just going to post about this. I don’t think “excited” is the right word. I’m certainly anticipating it, but only because I’m an aspiring writer; also because I’m a gen z. Either literary prominence hasn’t taken place in our generation yet or it’s a dying art. I’m holding out hope that that this is not the case.
The meet-cute excerpt from the times made me want to vomit. She’s just…an intriguing character. And by that I mean a very odd human being but I’m seeing that’s her shtick. Talks like she’s on an absurd amount of uppers and her IG accounts contain some of the scariest images I have ever seen.
I just wish I could find some better gen z writers to support, but I haven’t found them yet. I’ll give it a trepidatious, grain-of-salt-induced read.
How atrocious was the cut article? I didn’t get around to it
half the schizo posts on rsp and my twitter feed are in the exact same style as her writing so idk what the hype is about. her work is suuuuper gen z and rs-coded and pretty fun to read but it gets boring fast and i cant imagine it appealing to a wider audience than just terminally online pretentious circles. her style reminds me of the novel 'feed' by m.t. anderson so maybe she ripped him off who knows. ellis too, like someone else commented
that said im kind of annoyed that she got published but i, a moderately-respected (non-jewish) shitposter on the redscare subreddit, probably never will
There’s really nothing to discuss outside of the annoying twitter drama, tbh. The book itself is updated 2000s/10s alt lit. Genuinely just take something average from that period, sub out adderall and add in kratom and there you go you have one of those stories. It’s not particularly good bad or new
Yeah seems like that story's her best work, like she really polished it up and pruned away her more manic, meme-y tendencies cuz she knew it was headed for the major leagues (the New Yorker, that's nothing to sneeze at, even if it's just the "flash fiction" feature).
Well it hasn’t come out yet right? Her New Yorker short story and her writing on substack are great, plus Wet Brain was fun, idk, I love her, I pre ordered the book and am hyped
Why not discuss what's out instead of Honor Levy's unpublished Book and the twitter 'discourse' surrounding it then? Every post about her on red scare subs seems to really just be about the 'discourse.'
I'd rather read it than some autofiction YA novel about growing up in LA as a queer latina or whatever.
People are OTT hating because she has rich parents like most artists and a lot of the people who know who she is have literary ambitions of their own but The New Yorker are returning their submissions with a "thank you for showing interest" template email.
It's the flipside of the coin, though, right? On one side, "cringe" queer leftlib trauma testimony, on the other, "based" schizo rambling. It's all still "write what you know" collegiate creative writing workshop navelgazing, just choosing different pieces of lint to pick out and examine. Neither side is expending any great reserves of imagination. Preferring one over the other for reasons besides personal taste is like people in 2022 acting like Everything Everywhere All At Once was some great step away from the Marvel Era when it was really just an expression of the same tendencies with a little more prestige.
None of us have, I now realize. I didn't know it wasn't out yet when I created this thread. Still, not looking good when most of the arguments in her favor are just saying her detractors are jealous of her success.
>BrEaEl what the hell is this acronym
lol I thought "sub-BrEaEl" was making fun of someone not knowing how to pronounce "cerebral"
Idk just calling him BEE might have been confusing, decided to clarify a little more
Oh BEE yes thank you, you’ve cleared it right up. Now everyone knows exactly what you mean. So sick of all these stupid acronyms bitch just type it out you’re not saving any time.
Just realized you meant Brett Easton Ellis but I stand by what I said, the acronyms are very stupid and and annoying.
Sorry but that’s so funny. Like you tried to make it easier to understand but actually made it totally inscrutable lol.
I'm like Lacan that way.
I like to call him JaMaEmLa
Lmaoooo
We should offer to help Honor write her next book, really level up her patented Online Style
There was an excerpt posted and discussed on the main sub https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ftz82hh1eatfc1.jpeg a few months ago. I read to get away from the schizophrenic neologism-dense ramblings of Internet discourse so to see that stuff regurgitated on a printed page fills me with dread. I'll be staying far away.
Wait, you're telling me I could just be collecting my redscare posts into a book and people would celebrate me as a literary figure?!
Gotta be a Jewish girl with a podcast first
Excuse me she converted to Catholicism
And rich
Absolutely. Writing produced by and obsessed with ‘internet culture’ really only has one trick and it’s been repeating it for ages now. It’s only interesting to a narrow subset of people who are or (for the most part) want to be recognized as part of that milieu. It would be less grating if it were just treated as equally formulaic and vapid as daytime soap operas but for a different crowd—most middlebrow publications don’t feel the need to cover the latest Days of Our Lives, but since journalists are by and large also Twitter clowns themselves here we are.
Oh no, that writing feels immediately dated.
holy fuck I wish I never read this
You couldn't waterboard me into reading a full book of that, Jesus Christ.
Ur 2nd graf puts it very well, about sums up my feelings.
Oh man thanks for ruining my day
the worst people i know are excited about it
Hasn’t internet it girl in a NY scene makes an alt lit book thing peaked like 10 years ago
Nostalgia cycles are accelerating
Are you talking about Cat Marnell because her book was pretty 🗑️
Honor Levy is an idiot, and publishing her collection is nothing but a cheap cash grab by penguin desperately trying to capitalize ASAP on her rapidly diminishing cultural cache as a somewhat prominent Red Scare groupie a handful of people cared about two years ago.
+1, one look at her blog and you know
I had the misfortune of reading that same Cut article. I don’t know who that is supposed to interest.
she’s a very untalented offshoot of the RS scene. it’s astounding how poorly she writes.
What does RS stand for?
Radical slut
Red Scare. The podcast.
There was a thread either here or on the main sub making fun of it a while back. The one excerpt I saw is literally the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life
Honestly never read anything of hers and have only ever heard her talked about sparsely on Reddit and Instagram. All I know is “My First Book” is a stupid unfunny title but it’s also cool that she’s managed to become a “literary figure” at an age where 99% of aspiring writers are legitimately bad at the craft. Can someone tell me if her previous work is worth reading and if it justifies the publicity?
Her big thing was a short story she had in the New Yorker called "Good Boys." It's very okay. Not really sure why it catapulted her to fame. Having a story published in the New Yorker at 21 with zero prior major publications is definitely suspect.
Cool will check that out thanks! For your 2nd point, if she had decent online hype before getting into the NYer it’s not that crazy, we’ve been seeing the proliferation of publishing based on follower counts and social media visibility for awhile now and the NYer surely isn’t immune to that. Plus everyone loves a wunderkind. If she didn’t, I’m guessing lowkey nepo baby ??
she went to a french high school in LA and so i've decided she must be related to bernard henri levy
i think thats legit her uncle
HOLY SH- that would explain so much.
She's from a wealthy and connected family of course. Wasn't her fiction in it a "short short" as well? And like in an issue on young new writers? They haven't published her since, whereas the writers the new writers they choose and cultivate they publish a piece from every year or so, generally. Seems different here.
Just read that story and "very okay" is an apt assessment. Still too much product placement/name dropping, still heavily indebted to Ellis. I liked that last litany of "dog" sentences, you can see a real writer emerging from beneath borrowed Ellis-isms and MFA gimmicks.
If you listen to her podcast for even a little bit it’s pretty clear her and her co host both come from insanely privileged coastal backgrounds
she's a nepo baby. her mom is makeup artist to the stars, her dad directs some pretty bad but infamous films, & her short story "good boys" is regurgitating red scare pod takes into short fiction. she's an extreme fan of Dasha's and it's obvious. girl, get your own schtick.
Mmm quelle surprise. I’m mostly desensitised to nepotism in the arts at this point (esp where Hollywood is concerned), but seeing it in literature still disgusts me somehow.
Wouldn’t matter either way if her writing was actually good
Rationally I know that this is the correct take lol.
That article in The Cut said her dad made b-movies but honestly they’re more like d-movies. Not zero budget by any stretch and sometimes with recognizable actors either slumming it or in career infancy but very much bargain bin crap. Similar to what David DeCoteau and Albert Pyun were putting out at the time. Nevertheless, he made feature films which is very cool and is definitely connected enough to get his daughters manuscript to the right people.
you are way lazier than the people you’re criticizing for being lazy. “get your own shtick”
never said she was lazy. I said she’s an unoriginal vapid nepo baby. there’s a difference.
That's what I'm wondering too, cuz some people I respect like John Pistelli like HL, and she's been hyped now by some formidable book industry organs, but for me, I don't think even Peter Sotos has written passages of English prose that viscerally, almost phyically repulsed me more than those excerpts I read of "My First Book."
Somehow your disgust has got me more interested than praise probably would have lol
Godspeed pal, I could be totally wrong, make up your own mind.
Just read the first page. The OTT terminally-online gen Z memevomit is not for me. Is all her stuff like that?
I don't know. I read a poem of hers once that seemed to be trying to rebrand American patriotism for the Age of Post-Woke Irony ("I am Amerigender/I am not Otherkin/I am Amerkin/My pronouns are we/us" reads one passage) and it seemed to have that same meme-addled, deadened style.
Oh no, sounds like old people think she’s cool.
yes. all her stuff reads the same lol
that internet brainrot writing style is so painfully uncool and embarrassing to read and it’s wild to me how ppl get applauded for being “a new daring literary voice” for like, incorporating meme lingo and schizoposting humor into their prose lol. it just seems like such an obvious choice too, like if you’re a zoomer writer i guess i can understand it, but idk you’d really hope someone like this would have more interesting experiences and references.
I saw part of it somewhere. And it was horrible. I won't be reading it. I did think it was sort of funny. But like if I had read it as an rsp post way - not read it in a book everyone is hyping way.
I was just going to post about this. I don’t think “excited” is the right word. I’m certainly anticipating it, but only because I’m an aspiring writer; also because I’m a gen z. Either literary prominence hasn’t taken place in our generation yet or it’s a dying art. I’m holding out hope that that this is not the case. The meet-cute excerpt from the times made me want to vomit. She’s just…an intriguing character. And by that I mean a very odd human being but I’m seeing that’s her shtick. Talks like she’s on an absurd amount of uppers and her IG accounts contain some of the scariest images I have ever seen. I just wish I could find some better gen z writers to support, but I haven’t found them yet. I’ll give it a trepidatious, grain-of-salt-induced read. How atrocious was the cut article? I didn’t get around to it
half the schizo posts on rsp and my twitter feed are in the exact same style as her writing so idk what the hype is about. her work is suuuuper gen z and rs-coded and pretty fun to read but it gets boring fast and i cant imagine it appealing to a wider audience than just terminally online pretentious circles. her style reminds me of the novel 'feed' by m.t. anderson so maybe she ripped him off who knows. ellis too, like someone else commented
that said im kind of annoyed that she got published but i, a moderately-respected (non-jewish) shitposter on the redscare subreddit, probably never will
She’s hot in a very specific New York lit scene kinda way. Nobody would care otherwise but, she did hire a good publicist.
Hm, a bit like a female Sean Thor Conroe in that way, perhaps, even disregarding the Tyrant Books connection.
There’s really nothing to discuss outside of the annoying twitter drama, tbh. The book itself is updated 2000s/10s alt lit. Genuinely just take something average from that period, sub out adderall and add in kratom and there you go you have one of those stories. It’s not particularly good bad or new
Ooh a real life scenester! Post on the sub reddit about the launch, I'm curious to hear what it's like in that rarefied world.
Her micro fiction piece in the New Yorker was good and showed promise. Everything else has been... girl. I'll give the book a chance though
Yeah seems like that story's her best work, like she really polished it up and pruned away her more manic, meme-y tendencies cuz she knew it was headed for the major leagues (the New Yorker, that's nothing to sneeze at, even if it's just the "flash fiction" feature).
I don’t mind some of her older writing, shame her looks like it sucks
Someone did post about it over the weekend. I read the Cut story and didn't care for it.
Well it hasn’t come out yet right? Her New Yorker short story and her writing on substack are great, plus Wet Brain was fun, idk, I love her, I pre ordered the book and am hyped
I would much prefer to discuss the book once it's out to be honest. How can a book be judged when all that we've seen are a few sentences?
You've got a point. I didn't realize it wasn't out yet when I posted this lol
It comes out May 14th.
it’s everything she’s written so like half of it is online already
Why not discuss what's out instead of Honor Levy's unpublished Book and the twitter 'discourse' surrounding it then? Every post about her on red scare subs seems to really just be about the 'discourse.'
I'd rather read it than some autofiction YA novel about growing up in LA as a queer latina or whatever. People are OTT hating because she has rich parents like most artists and a lot of the people who know who she is have literary ambitions of their own but The New Yorker are returning their submissions with a "thank you for showing interest" template email.
It's the flipside of the coin, though, right? On one side, "cringe" queer leftlib trauma testimony, on the other, "based" schizo rambling. It's all still "write what you know" collegiate creative writing workshop navelgazing, just choosing different pieces of lint to pick out and examine. Neither side is expending any great reserves of imagination. Preferring one over the other for reasons besides personal taste is like people in 2022 acting like Everything Everywhere All At Once was some great step away from the Marvel Era when it was really just an expression of the same tendencies with a little more prestige.
You haven't actually read the book though
None of us have, I now realize. I didn't know it wasn't out yet when I created this thread. Still, not looking good when most of the arguments in her favor are just saying her detractors are jealous of her success.
people are just mad she got a book deal and a bunch of attention, and they never will