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FAKE ACCOUNTS

Lauren Oyler

A whip smart, funny and biting literary debut about relationships in the age of social media and conspiracy trolls.

FAKE ACCOUNTS opens in January 2017 as our unnamed narrator, a young woman in a post-election tailspin, decides there's never been a better time to break into her boyfriend's cell phone. She discovers Felix (if that's his real name ) is secretly a quite popular online conspiracy theorist.

That's the first in a series of Russian doll-like revelations that send her reeling and inspire a move from New York to Berlin, where she becomes a small-scale compulsive liar---though in her defense, mainly with OkCupid dates. As our narrator approaches her relationships with the wary hopefulness of someone whose beloved pet recently bit her, a series of jaw-dropping deceptions follow suit. Thrumming underneath it all is the age-old question that has gained new urgency as the internet has inundated us with the thoughts and opinions of unprecedented numbers of other people: am I going crazy?

Combining the “voice of a generation” quality of Adelle Waldman and Sally Rooney with bursts of exquisite observational humor reminiscent of Otessa Mosfegh and Maria Semple, the result is an energetic exploration of social media, sex, feminism, online dating, astrology, fiction, and the "connection" they've all promised but failed to deliver.

Lauren Oyler's essays on books, pop culture, and feminism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the Cut and elsewhere. She is the co-author of two books with Alyssa Mastromonaco, the former deputy chief of staff for President Obama: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, a New York Times bestseller, and So Here's the Thing..., published on March 5, 2019. She grew up in Hurricane, West Virginia, and lives in Brooklyn. She spends as much time in Berlin as possible.

FAKE ACCOUNTS
Deutsch von Bettina Abarbanell
[HC Berlin 02/2022]
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Published 2021-02-01 by Catapult

Comments

"This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it." —Zadie Smith "Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts is such an ensorcelling blend of insight, comedy and suspense, you almost don't notice yourself being filleted alive in these pages. A note to fellow readers of the twenty-first century: Anyone familiar with the allure of social media will adore this coolly observed novel. A note to fellow writers of the twenty-first century: Oh crap, she did it." —Sloane Crosley, author of Look Alive Out There and I Was Told There'd Be Cake "Fake Accounts is an absorbing and shameless examination of the way self-mythologies are forged and performed in the public privacy of the internet. Fans of Lauren Oyler's ferocious criticism will love this 21st century comedy of bad manners." —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers "Somehow Lauren Oyler hacked my brain preferences and wrote the novel I've been waiting years to read. To spend time in the pages of this stealthily radical book is to submit to Oyler's dopamine experiment of 'social media realism'—a genre I believe she has pioneered—and to cycle endlessly from obsession to logic to paranoia to grandiosity to salvation to idolatry to distrust. This novel is, above all, a gripping blast to read, and so, so effortlessly smart." —Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock and The Vanishers "Lauren Oyler holds a funhouse mirror up to our cracked reality, daring the reader to follow her into the depths of online fakery, app-based sociality, and late-capitalist dissonance, the mazelike illogic of our information-glutted times. In her masterful hands, you may feel your own carefully-constructed 21st-century persona begin to unravel, revealing something much less tidy and much more provocative dwelling beneath." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine “Only if a novelist is traditional in the right ways—in her moral intelligence, in her complex eloquence, in her patient plotting—can she properly register the real newness of our hurtling world of social media and a mediatized society. Lauren Oyler has written a very funny and serious contemporary novel. You must pick it up if you read fiction and/or tweets.” —Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

UK: Fourth Estate; Italy: Bompiani; Japan: Hayakawa; Russia: AST;

"A century ago New York City got Edith Wharton; now the World Wide Web gets Lauren Oyler. We're even." Read more...