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

[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)

Prolific essayist 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 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

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 divisive, 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 . . . 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

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