Flat Earth
Flat Earth is the debut novel from writer Anika Jade Levy. Levy is the co-founder of Forever Magazine and served as the guest editor for Do Not Research in 2025. She is a pivotal figure in the NYC downtown literary scene — her new book, Flat Earth, is an in-depth character portrait of today’s edgy, avant-garde and irony-poisoned creative milieu.
Get the book: Flat Earth.
Before the internet, New York City served as the epicenter for emerging arts, music, literature and many other forms of culture. In the post Post-Internet era, social media caused most creative practices to drift into the personal brand. Today, cultural production has largely been reduced to a diffuse form of lifestyle-as-performance art.
In this new media paradigm, creative aspirants harness the attentional power of controversy to launch creative projects that are often a distant and secondary consideration to their online personas. As far back as in 2012, Brad Troemel described this emerging phenomena as “artists without art” in the seminal essay “Art After Social Media”. For all the think-pieces written about Dimes Square (RIP) its difficult to name one good piece of art that came out of it — this is where the work of Anika Jade Levy stands apart.
Since 2021, Levy has diligently worked to promote other young and talented writers through Forever Magazine. Alongside her co-founder, Madeline Cash, they independently fundraise and produce a print magazine in an era where traditional media has long been considered a foregone luxury. To afford publishing in print, Levy does this editorial work for free. Sometimes she even mails out the issues herself.
In a 24/7 newsfeed that incentivizes shitposting, abrasive personal brands and gossip columns, Levy has instead cultivated a long form studio practice and produced a singular, definitive work for this era. Her debut novel, Flat Earth encapsulates the unique experience of a creative generation in historic and ideologically confused times. When cultural studies departments look back to recall what the phenomena of Dimes Square even was, they will cite Flat Earth.
Anchored in New York City, the story is punctuated by anecdotes of an American road trip. Flat Earth is a pilgrimage to sites of conspiracy and political extremism, where hot girl art hoes visit the Georgia Guidestones, Waco Texas, and swipe right on a conservative dating app named Patriarchy.
Levy’s protagonist, Avery, toils at the bizarre niche of grad student poverty and creative jet set; a cash poor writer who is gifted free travel but can’t afford the cab from the airport. Avery compares herself to her highly successful yet deeply troubled friend and collaborator (don’t we all). New York City is ravaged by extreme weather, pharmaceutical addiction, and deep state pedophile rings with corporate co-conspirators (it’s real folks).
Levy paints a vividly realistic world, complete with all the decadent trappings of a society whose institutions have long since failed. Meanwhile, the elite “resistance”, appears righteous on the outside but behind the scenes, or in the bedroom, they reveal themselves as narcissistic artists or predatory graduate professors. Flat Earth is an anonymized documentary of creative life and radical politics today. It is a diary of cultural participation, suffuse with extremely online references, that uniquely encapsulates the 2020s experience of creative life in New York City.
Get the book: Flat Earth.
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.
Flat Earth
The email arrived like a message from outer space: an offer for an entry-level publicity job at a right-wing dating app. I wasn’t sure exactly when I had applied for it, but the dwindling bottle of Ambien at my bedside suggested I might have been engaging in some mysterious nighttime internet activity. Our job description was publicity and research assistance. The email said I would mostly be writing white papers about the app — its users and use cases, reports about the state of online dating in general.
I knew that my old friends would disapprove of me working for this company, and that my mother would call me a trader to my gender and say something like prostitution would be preferable. Still, I felt a sense of accomplishment and I wanted to tell someone. I texted my mother and told her I got a job that involved writing. I shouldn’t have given her any more details, even when she asked for them. She called me on the phone for the first time in months to berate me. I tried to take this opportunity to fill her in on my life a little. I told her how my friend had died, and also I kept getting targeted ads on Instagram suggesting that I had been sexually assaulted by a Lyft driver and that I may be entitled to compensation. I was standing in a patch of sunlight by the window, holding the phone away from my ear because I’d decided to be afraid of radiation. My mother said I should be careful, because these algorithms tended to be predictive, narrowing in on exactly the kind of girl who would get herself raped by a rideshare driver.
In a boardroom, the Executive brought me up to speed. The dating app was run out of two departments: Reality and Fiction. We were in Reality for the moment — I would meet his cofounder in Fiction when I negotiated my salary. The initiative is scaling intimacy, he told me. Our big targets right now are movement and community: men who eat uncooked organ meat, sports gambling enthusiasts, porn-sick degenerates, downwardly mobile white men in red states. Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart. I’m not the one who deindustrialized the Rust Belt and sent all our manufacturing overseas.
The app was called Patriarchy. In a perfect world, the men would be really rich and the girls would be really pretty, but the economy had taken a nosedive, and they were prepared to settle for hyper-online incel-adjacent misogynists and young white women with low self-esteem and craft-orientated art practices like needlepoint or ceramics. The problem was that the app was having a hard time attracting the right kind of women, or any kind of women.
Ostensibly my job was to pilot the platform and provide weekly written reports, but I suspected that I was one of a suite of girls who had been hired to create a profile and help repair the gender ratio. The morning I was scheduled to negotiate my salary, I took a microdose of psilocybin because I thought it would make me more creative — someone told me creativity is the secret key to negotiating with a man. I must have miscalculated. When I stepped into the office from the freezing street, I was keenly aware of all my extremities, how alienating and bizarre it was to be inside a body. Every surface I encountered hummed with electricity.
The Head of Fiction greeted me before I had a chance to acclimate myself to the carefully conditioned indoor environment. He was younger than I had imagined, almost handsome, although his hair was thinning. We sat down at a big communal table and I realized that I had positioned myself directly underneath an industrial heating vent. The warmth cut clean across one side of my body. My left eye watered and I felt as if I was having a small, insignificant stroke. I could smell myself sweating. It was too late to take off my parka.
The Head of Fiction looked at me expectantly and cleared his throat.
You’re not a Marxist, are you? he asked me.
I don’t think so, I said.
He stared at me.
I’m not ideological, I said.
He seemed satisfied. He pulled out his wallet and took out a business card. He turned the card over, wrote down a string of numbers, and passed it across the table to me. I looked at the card and I looked at the man’s face. There were fractals coming out of his receding hairline. Finally, I realized that these numbers represented my salary. This seems fine, I said. It was a painless transaction.
The men at the Patriarchy app were Catholic but seemed to imagine themselves as possessing a Protestant work ethic. These were men, I imagined, whose mothers had received the best home economics education on Earth, women who assembled quilting circles for religious occasions and still helped their grown boys file their taxes.
I shared a cubicle with Eleanor, an over-caffeinated and hypersexual Catholic girl with no middle name. She was two years younger than me, but sometimes she looked at me as if attempting to study me from across the other side of the twenty-first century. Eleanor adored the idea that she was being paid to go on dates since she would have done it just as soon for free. Eleanor’s father had been a famous fascist in the nineties, so the Executives were mostly kind to her, save for the occasional comment about her insufficient performance of religious piety: I see you didn’t get your ashes today. I wondered if any of the men in my life might be a good fit for the app. The only person who came to mind was an older man I’d slept with in college who kept a plaid skirt in his closet and instructed girls to try it on when they visited his apartment. He had been a mildly successful musician in the early aughts. The garment was a plaid maternity skirt fashioned to look like a cheerleading uniform, a sort of one-size-fits-all three-in-one fantasy: a skirt made for a pregnant Catholic gymnast. I hesitated the first time he asked me to put it on. The thick elastic waistband encircled me like a black belt in karate. I imagined women in their third trimester doing cartwheels in the halls of their Catholic school, flying through the air, getting athletically fingered by sinewy football players under the bleachers.
Even though our job title was Junior Public Relations and Research Assistant, Eleanor and I both understood that we were being paid to spend time swiping on the app. Eleanor never let me forget that she was a full two years younger than me, and I suspected that for this reason she might have been paid more than me. All work is sex work. From my cubicle in One World Trade, I bypassed all the young doctors, the handsome heirs to textile and manufacturing fortunes. I thought that I might display some diligence by going straight for the most repulsive patriarch I could find, a syphilitic-looking unvaccinated conspiracy theorist.
The Head of Fiction told me to go meet the man. Nothing illicit, just a friendly conversation in a public place. These were the kinds of anthropological expeditions I was meant to write about in my reports.
The man told me about transhumanism, about developmental chemicals in American water calcifying our pineal glands, about the disassembly of biological sexual categories, depopulation, gender nonconforming frogs. Look at you, he said. You should have birthed four children by this point. I bet you don’t know how to cook. You use your smartphone to summon a climate refugee to bring you tacos. This app is supposed to have the most docile, educated girls in the world. Instead it’s all fatherless waifs, girls who went to clown college, girls who went to rehab for weed. You think that you’re an artist, but you’re a techno-feudalist like me; you just can’t see it because you’re so low on the food chain. You never learned a trade so you pay your rent piecemeal, going on dates with men who take you to moderately priced sushi restaurants and issue you your allowance in ecologically responsible cryptocurrency. It’s a good enough gig if you can get it, so enjoy it while you can, I guess. In two years, the cost of fresh fish will have tripled and you’ll be too old to wear that pleated skirt.
Get the book: Flat Earth.
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