Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler
Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler
2 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

Fake Accounts

Author: Lauren Oyler

Narrator: Rebecca Lowman

Unabridged: 10 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/02/2021


Synopsis

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

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

About The Author

LAUREN OYLER's essays on books and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, The Guardian, New York magazine's The Cut, The New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jack on March 20, 2024

i would've faked my own death to get away from her too......more

Goodreads review by emma on December 12, 2022

they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. but i am not nice and i don't like to follow rules. i spend most of my life complaining and i'm certainly not going to stop now. i do, however, want to stop thinking about this book permanently, so i'll just say this was compl......more

Goodreads review by Adam on October 01, 2020

Really funny, really smart, incisive re: modern life, and super weird structurally in ways I can’t wait to talk about - Oyler is incredibly experimental here, giving us parodies of fragmented novels, lots of analysis of our generation's internet habits, literary references from Dickens to Ashbery, a......more

Goodreads review by Sid on December 24, 2020

I’m afraid I’d had enough of Fake Accounts after about a third of the book and gave up. The set-up sounded intriguing: a young woman finds that her partner has secretly been posting to conspiracy theory blogs, which seems entirely alien to who she believes him to be. This leads into an investigation......more

Goodreads review by Ron on February 10, 2021

In Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts,” an inveterate liar reveals the humiliating truth about our social media age. The deceptive posing, the withering irony, the infinitely cloned political outrage — it’s all splayed out here in this witty novel that captures a certain species of Internet life better t......more