A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the Women's Prize for
Nonfiction NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | National Indie Bestseller A New York Times notable
book of 2023 | Vulture 's #1 book of 2023 One of Slate 's ten best books of 2023 | A Guardian
best ideas book of 2023 | One of Time 's ten best books of 2023 | Winner of the Pacific
Northwest Book Award "I've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of
another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through." -Michelle Goldberg
The New York Times "If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark
years it would be this one." -Katie Roiphe The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self-a double who was almost
you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but in a
twisted upside-down way furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting
against? Not long ago the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just
such an experience-she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but
whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got
confused about who was who. Destabilized she lost her bearings until she began to understand
the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle
to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication
New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political
allegiances of left and right and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist
authoritarianism even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions reality itself seems to have
become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of
our most trenchant and influential social critics an essential analyst of what branding
austerity and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her
gaze inward to our psychic landscapes and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid
intersecting economic medical and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud
Jordan Peele Alfred Hitchcock and bell hooks among other accomplices Klein uses wry humor
and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us-and that have come
to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir
with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis Klein seeks to smash that mirror and
chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our
digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a
culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true
reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us
think and feel now-and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
