In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.

The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on.

I'm sorry, "lol girls with mustache fingers" is high literature but "we are the future of the planet" is stupid? Did the author flip a coin on each of those to decide where it'd go?

Also what the fuck is this about Adderall, I don't even understand what it would mean to collectivise "the Adderall sector", but wasn't there a shortage of ADD medication not so long ago where people who needed it couldn't get it? Wouldn't we want to collectivise this??