Virtual Event: Lauren Oyler and Anna Wiener

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“This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it.” —Zadie Smith

“Oyler has written a startlingly lucid account of what it does to a person to live a life filled with lies, why it’s so painful to be unable to trust anything or anyone, including yourself…I laughed a lot while reading this, even when—especially when—I very much saw myself as the joke. What Fake Accounts is ultimately asking, then, is a question we could all do well to pose to ourselves with some frequency: Who do you think you’re fooling?” ––Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year

“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

A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “incisive” and “funny” debut novel that “brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she’s relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women’s March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can’t trust anyone—shouldn’t the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.