I never planned on writing about literary it-girl Honor Levy. I knew Levy would get tons of press in the lead-up to the publication of her first book, the brilliantly titled My First Book, marketed as “A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Good Morning America, W, Nylon, SheReads, and LitHub.” So I wasn’t particularly interested in playing a part in her masterly publicity rollout. Levy, the poster girl of the New York City Dimes Square scene, already had a built-in audience of fans and all-important haters, the true drivers of literary engagement. So it was all but a guarantee that her book would be a grand success. I enjoyed sitting on the sidelines and watching her haters and her fans battle on X. I giggled in glee imagining her publicist giggling in far greater glee as the plan beautifully played out. “You won’t get me, you savvy publicist,” I thought. Honor will not dishonor me!
But here I am, writing about the publicity machine behind My First Book, writing about Honor Levy. Even her name is literary gold. Did her parents plan it? Were they in on it from the jump? Perhaps I’m the greatest mark of all.
Still, for the few of us who still care about literary matters, the subject of the ins and outs of the publicity machine is important to talk about. No matter how we may feel about Levy or her work, it’s always a good thing when a literary book is being talked about. Sales for literary fiction are continually plummeting while editors who head literary imprints are being axed. In this increasingly inhospitable environment for literary fiction, Honor Levy’s My First Book is undoubtedly a success. How did she do it? Or, let us pose the better question: how did they do it? It was certainly a group effort.
It was always obvious that My First Book was going to be hyped up, just as it’s obvious which books would be published to absolute silence. Not a single review or profile or podcast appearance for those literary losers. Maybe that’s honorable, but they’re still losers in the game. Anyone who has any sense of what the literary tastemakers — agents, publicists, magazine editors — prop up can take a look at an upcoming books list and easily predict which books will get the full-court press and which ones won’t even make it off the bench. Anything written by an “it girl,” upper class and writing about a coastal city, will get coverage all over the place, the pieces often written by the same writers, whose entire output is seemingly propping up their friends. Books about sad people of color, which appeal to the overly female and progressive demographic that gobbles up literary fiction, are also propped up. Everything else is mostly ignored, leaving writers to fend for themselves.
Levy built a following before her book was published, which no doubt made it easier to garner glossy magazine publicity. Hers was an exquisite two-week rollout, not a day going by without an article and subsequent X hysterics. As recent articles have stated, literary publicists can cost upwards of $50,000, which obviously means that only the affluent can afford their services. The publicity world, like the agenting and media worlds, is small and incestuous, with agents sometimes becoming publicists and vice versa. That is to say that it’s always the same 50 people, mostly ladies, backscratching and boosting each other’s clients (friends). It’s not a coincidence that the same types of books are profiled by the same magazines. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just how the literary game is played. If you’re a debut author and want the big coverage, you either need to befriend the publishing clique or shell out major cash to one of the publicists in the hope that they’ll pull you into it. The other option is to go full gonzo mode and shill your book on the heterodox circuit and hope for the best. That’s how the literary game is played in 2024 and will be played for the foreseeable future.
For a literary book, and a book of short stories, at that, to break out in the manner My First Book has means that an entire team of players must commit to their roles until critical mass is achieved. The obvious players include Levy, who cultivated a following through her Wet Brain podcast and her activity in the early days of the Dimes Square scene. Her publicists, who placed profiles and interviews in all manner of glossies, such as Vanity Fair and New York magazine, certainly are worthy of MVP status. Then you have the plethora of critics who wanted that Levy rub, knowing full well that generating clicks for her would garner them that precious engagement they all desire. It didn’t matter if a critic panned or gave the book a rave, either — Levy brought the readers. What’s important is that the critics get the pieces out while the publicity train’s moving so they can juice their numbers off the engagement swell.
And then you have the unsung heroes who are really driving engagement — the haters. If I were a publicist, I’d pay some decently sized X accounts to “trash” my authors and drive engagement. But in Levy’s case, the haters surely worked pro bono. The haters have helped her more than her fans and have certainly expanded the scope of her readership beyond the provincial literary sphere. Before My First Book dropped, for example, a hater on X derisively tweeted out the beginning of the collection’s opening story, “Love Story”: “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other.”
The post went viral, with thousands of likes and hundreds of quote posts — a glorious literary pile-on by the aggrieved and the jealous. Then you had the sycophants, defending Honor’s honor, certainly hoping that a “dissident” tastemaker or whoever saw their defense of the Dimes Square princess. It didn’t matter that Levy’s work was being judged and trashed based on a single paragraph from a single story — what mattered was to get in on the engagement. Everyone played their part in the engagement-generating swirl. For a short time, Levy brought together the entire literary community, and for that, she deserves credit.
It didn’t matter that Levy’s work was being judged and trashed based on a single paragraph from a single story — what mattered was to get in on the engagement. During the heavy press push for My First Book, after every new Levy profile or interview, the haters would start up the engagement machine again. We can’t know what, if anything, Levy spent on publicists. But her haters and sycophants, working harmoniously as a literary community of desperation and cringe, surely offered a priceless literary service.
But is My First Book any good? Well, it’s definitely a first book, which is to say that it’s uneven and, on occasion, shows flashes of brilliance. It’s forgettable, like most first books, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t literary value in Levy’s project. She’s been called the “voice of a generation” by her fans, which isn’t exactly untrue if by “generation” one means the hyper-online milieu populated by Zoomers, in which memes and “edgy” online lingo rule the day.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The collection’s widely derided opener, “Love Story,” is probably the best encapsulation of this hyper-online world in which atomized young people try dodderingly to forge connections. Levy authentically captures the scene’s lingo, and the story is funny and even moving in the end. The hate directed at Levy is less about the quality of the work and more about the fact that she just so happened to be the right person in the right place and with the right friends at the right cultural moment. Someone was going to publish the first Red Scare-adjacent book and be labeled the voice of a generation, and Levy just so happened to be down there writing stories and podcasting. She beat everybody else to the punch, and so, for better or worse, she is the voice of that generation.
The literary game, of course, is rigged, so one understands the hate directed at Levy, who’s merely a symbol. But don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter @Perez_Writes.
