A Washington Post Best Book of the Year Editors'' Choice, The New York Times Book Review Entertainment Weekly, A Best New Book of the Month Esquire , A Best Book of the Year Named a Most-Anticipated Book of the Year by Elle * Vulture * BuzzFeed * The Millions * Literary Hub * The Rumpus * Bustle * and more. "This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it." --Zadie Smith "Witty and self-aware." -- The New Yorker "[A] witty novel that captures a certain species of Internet life better than any other book I''ve read. A century ago New York City got Edith Wharton; now the World Wide Web gets Lauren Oyler. We''re even." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post "Social media has lurked in the background of contemporary literary fiction .
but here it feels, finally, fully and thoroughly explored, with style and originality . I felt sharpened by it, grateful for its provocations." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "An invigorating work, deadly precise in its skewering of people, places and things . Stylish, despairing and very funny, Fake Accounts . adroitly maps the dwindling gap between the individual and the world." --Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review "[The] narrative voice will ring bells with fans of Oyler''s criticism. It''s confident, knowing, fond of putting on a performance and owning it." --Clare Bucknell, WSJ.
Magazine "Smart and dark . A pleasure to read and easy to inhale. The writer is brilliant, bringing to life a narrator with a penetrating gaze and a mordant, misanthropic voice." --Scott Stern, The New Republic "Pitch-perfect descriptions of online interactions . The effect of reading the book is akin to falling into an hours-long social media binge: maddening, revealing, addictive." --Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair "Full of brilliantly astute cultural criticisms . The premise may sound dark, but Lauren Oyler''s delightfully wry, sharply observational prose turns the protagonist''s pity party into a lively affair." --Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly "Oyler perfectly, cringingly captures the pseudo-worldly millennial hustler .
[She] unravels--in a darkly comic novel that takes several satiric turns, including a memorable send-up of autofiction--the weighty, inescapable feeling of being online and never being able to log off, and the way we create fictional universes for ourselves." --Rachel Tashjian, GQ "An absolutely brilliant take on the bizarre and despicable ways the internet has warped our perception of reality . Equal parts witty and deceptive, this is a startling critique of what we know to be true but struggle to accept." -- Elle , One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year "[A] ruthless depiction of the devastatingly alienated lives of downwardly mobile but not destitute ''creative'' millennials . Oyler is a talented prose stylist, darkly funny at times, biting, clever. Her narrator''s observations of the world are crystal-clear and true." --Marianela D''Aprile, Jacobin "One of the year''s sharpest debut novels . Told in our narrator''s seductive, incisive, and often deceptive voice, Fake Accounts is a ferociously smart dissection of the social media age, where we''re long on carefully-crafted fictions and short on truth.
"--Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire , A Best Book of the Year "Outstanding . You''ll laugh, you''ll groan, and like many subjects of Oyler''s book reviews, you''ll perhaps see more of yourself than you''d like to in her pages." --Jenny Singer, Glamour "You''ll be charmed from the start by Oyler''s astute, slyly scathing take on living and dating in the Trump era." --Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia Inquirer "Ambitious and accomplished, and quite funny." --Emma Sarappo, Washington City Paper "Oyler is an extremely talented and insightful literary critic . and a lot of this book is a critique of both contemporary literary fiction and of the way we''re taught to think and speak by the larger media ecosystem." --Constance Grady, Vox "Fake Accounts is exciting for its commitment to considering everything, to never glossing over." --Claire Fallon, HuffPost "Oyler is as unsparing of those things she finds tedious and facile--fragmented novels, online performances, the glorification of navel-gazing--in her fiction as she is in her criticism, only in Fake Accounts she is able to have a new kind of fun with these critiques, to explore them more deeply by inhabiting and experimenting with them, and to reflect reality by recasting it as a kind of hyper-reality .
Oyler wrote a contemporary novel that is reflective of the time, without participating in any of the unspoken, agreed upon ways to reflect this time: There is no undue catastrophizing, no moral posturing, there is just reality, believe it or not." --Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 " Fake Accounts takes place at the onset of the Trump administration. There are pussy hats. But the psychic rupture of the debut of the Trump times is backdrop for a story that is mostly about the effects of exposure to the Internet on the self . This is a portrait of a person made incredibly ill by the Internet. She may be going mad and trying to take us down with her." --Choire Sicha, The New York Review of Books "Lauren Oyler''s smart and funny Fake Accounts is an incredibly accurate representation of what it means to be a person who''s online . Anyone familiar with Olyer''s brilliant book criticism will love this self-assured and witty debut.
" -- Literary Hub , Best Books of the Year.