A Paperback Paris Most Anticipated Book

A Bustle Most Anticipated Debut of the Year

A Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year

An Electric Literature Most Anticipated Debut of the Year

"Insightful and hilarious. Oyler is well-versed in irony, and the book is replete with witty, humorous observations about her own generation and milieu." —Ramona Tausz, First Things

"[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

"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

"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

"Set to hit high highbrow on the hypemeter for its 'savage and shrewd' account of a young millennial’s mediation of life via the internet." —The Millions, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"The most devastatingly funny examination of Twitter and what it does to our brains that I, a known Twitter addict, have yet read. Lauren’s satirical gaze is also trained on autofiction, dating apps, Berlin expat life, the self-importance of Brooklyn bloggers (very much including herself), and other painfully familiar subjects, but her expert prose and plotting elevate all of the above beyond everyday online discourse." —David Klion, Jewish Currents 

"An absorbing, intelligent, charmingly meta novel about what it’s like to live right now, both on and off the internet." —Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"If you’re looking for fiction that understands the complexities of life online and the way that world seeps into reality, this is it." —Madison Malone Kircher, A Vulture Most Anticipated Book of the Year 

"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

"If you’re looking to understand our political context through the lens of a personal narrative, Fake Accounts is worth preordering . . . In a time when liars become not only famous YouTubers but talk show hosts and even presidents, is it possible to dig through to get to the truth?" —Rachel Charlene Lewis, Bitch

"Plenty of fiction and nonfiction explores how performance of the self on social media can be detrimental to our lives. Fake Accounts raises the bar on this theme, prompting the question of how much distance a person can really put between oneself and an online persona." —Jessica Wakeman, BookPage

"Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is a delicious commentary on the internet and social media and a compelling story of a woman struggling to find her way . . . The narrator is an excellent liar, yet you feel like she is telling you the truth because of Oyler’s smart prose, which is often directed to you, the reader." —Alma, A Favorite Book for Winter

"Oyler’s first foray into fiction seduces with its mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness and exploration of identity and authenticity, commitment and abandonment . . . Oyler’s piercing examination of the paradoxically immersive superficiality of life lived in the thrall of social media is hefty in its own right, a case of both too much information and, ironically, not enough. Sure to resonate with the multitasking Millennials and Gen Z digerati." —Booklist (starred review) 

"[A] unique, ferociously modern voice. This incisive, funny work brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

"A mordant take on postmodern mores . . . [A] smart, often funny critique of a culture that rewards people for turning themselves into brands and encourages the incessant consumption and creation of content." —Kirkus Reviews 

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

"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

"Fake Accounts percolates the big moral questions of our age—fraudulence, identity as performance, surveillance capitalism, political instability, personal freedom—through a narrative arc driven ingeniously by low-level dopamine hits. At the same time, it is very, very funny. Oyler is the kind of dangerous contemporary writer we need more of." —Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy and winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award 2020

"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

"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

“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