Levitations is coming from New York Review Books in February 2027. A story about geology, late capitalism, and the addled character of our contemporary moment, Levitations is set in Leefield, a sleepy New England town whose mine has recently been reopened by investors hoping to harvest “extraterrestrial minerals” from an ancient, buried asteroid. The narrative hops between the perspectives of several different characters, including Frankiette, a jaded thirty-something searching for a new life; Durdo, a mentally unwell Marxist scholar whose father has invested in the mine; Jem, Smiley, and Slojo, three high schoolers trying to understand the world through YouTube; and a number of nonhuman entities, such as a chicken, a knife, and the town of Leefield itself. Like Joy Williams and George Saunders, Smith deftly mixes the painfully real with the spectacular and absurd. Though it features levitating teenagers, the specter of Slavoj Žižek, and an asteroid-worshipping cult, the novel ultimately seems to ask: Where in the world is there any hope for renewal?


Praise for Levitations:

“There are writers—not many of them—who can capture the whole world in one short novel. They describe some characters, a town, and before you know it, there is humanity in all its raw feeling and pain, its love and violence—its motives, which are sometimes altruistic, but mostly ​fickle or absurd. Easton Smith’s Levitations, weaving back and forth between tragedy and comedy, is a novel ​built along just these lines. It’s a virtuoso performance.”
—Gabriela Cabezón Cámara