Mateo Askaripour and Lauren Oyler - Real…and Unreal

The world is changing so fast that we often find ourselves asking…could that really happen? Did that really happen? Mateo Askaripour’s novel Black Buck is the story of Buck. Before Buck was the Muhammad Ali of sales, he was Darren: an unambitious twenty-two-year-old living with his mother and working at Starbucks. All that changed with a coffee order from the CEO of NYC’s hottest tech startup, resulting in Darren joining their elite sales team. On his first day Darren realizes he is the only Black person in the company, and when things start to get strange, he reimagines himself as ‘Buck’, a ruthless salesman, unrecognizable to his friends and family.

In Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, 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. 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.