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Books & Films — Doppelganger
Description
A guide to the wildness of now.
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?
This richly nuanced intellectual adventure story begins with Naomi grappling with her own doppelganger, a public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, her gaze turns both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, to name a few—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises. Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now.
“This book is a departure for me. It’s more personal, more experimental, and while it’s not about my doppelganger in any traditional sense, it does explore what it feels like to watch one’s identity slip away in the digital ether, an experience many more of us will have in the age of AI. Mostly, it’s an attempt to grapple with the wildness of right now—with conspiracy cultures surging and strange left-right alliances emerging and nobody seeming to be quite what they seem. Doppelganger is my attempt at a usable map of our moment in history—but to make it, I had to get lost a few times.”
Praise & Reviews
Judith Butler, Author of Gender Trouble and The Force of Nonviolence
“Naomi Klein’s thoughtful and honest inquiry into the troubling duplication of her name and the distorted appropriation of her views becomes the occasion for an incisive account of how the Right has appropriated Left discourses, producing a nightmarish doubling that has plunged some of us into silence. Klein writes herself back into existence and brings the rest of us with her, contesting the self as both brand and projection. In the course of a truly admirable struggle against proprietary selfhood, Klein illuminates the threat of mirroring posed by Fascist messaging that absorbs and negates the most urgent convictions on the Left. Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times, showing us how to resist the lures of Fascism with militant humility and connection, letting ourselves be upended by what we thought we could not bear to see so that we can face and build an affirmative future.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“Naomi Klein has been one of our most important intellectuals, distilling the political economies of corruption and crisis in our time. Her new work examines the ways these crises have taken new form, exemplified by the absurd and dangerous political stunts and spectacles that have come to dominate our societies today. Klein plunges into the topsy-turvy world of doubles, mirrors, and shadowlands to show that the growth of the right is not a case of despised malignancies infecting our otherwise pure societies; rather, it’s a matter of our own fears, insecurities, and defense mechanisms, all of them rooted in a savagely unequal and violent society. Klein writes with humor, enormous bravery, and humbling vulnerability. This is an extraordinary book.”
Molly Crabapple, Author of Drawing Blood
“A dazzling, hallucinatory tour de force that takes the reader through shadow selves and global fascism, leaving them gasping by the end.”
Bill McKibben, Author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon and Falter
“It seems ever more possible that our society might collapse under the sheer weight of nonsense and performance and crazy misinformation that overwhelm our infoworld. With her trademark clarity and perception, and with chemo-level doses of wit and common sense, Naomi Klein goes further than anyone has gone so far in helping us understand that buzzing and confounding mess, and to see some ways out. If ever a book was necessary, it’s this one.”
V (Formerly Eve Ensler), Author of Reckoning and The Vagina Monologues
“If you want to make sense of a world upside-down, this staggering masterpiece will show you how—and then it blazes a path to a more loving and caring future.”
Douglas Rushkoff, Documentarian and Author of Survival of the Richest
“This will be remembered as Naomi Klein’s true master work: the ultimate expression of our collective crisis, told through the necessarily subjective lens of human experience. Decades of research and praxis inform what amounts to a literary odyssey into the funhouse of media mirror worlds — a journey from which we return with greater wisdom about our predicament and clarity about how to extricate ourselves, together. Doppelganger
deploys the full spectrum of human faculties — imagination, intuition, will, perception, memory, and reason — to conjure a stunningly satisfying rejection of both technocratic capitalism and fascist authoritarianism. A triumph.”
China Miéville, Author of The City & The City and A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto
“This book is as foreboding as a guide through the maze of mirrors of the modern right should be. But it’s not only that: Naomi Klein has made Doppelganger gripping and scintillating, too. The result is a reckoning with the present moment that’s as insightful as all of Klein’s indispensable work, and as suspenseful as a novel.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, Author of The Ministry for the Future
“Naomi Klein’s books have been building one on the next to create a very powerful and influential cognitive mapping of our time. This new book takes a personal turn, then opens out into an analysis of our shared global dilemma that is as incisive and fascinating as anything she has ever written—which is saying a lot. And it’s also quite moving. As always, my first thought on finishing one of her books is Thank you.”
Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Naomi Klein never disappoints. Doppelganger swirls through the bewildering ideas of the ultra-right that often appear as a distorted mirror of left struggle and strategy. With her always incisive analysis of the systems and structures linked to global capitalism, Klein now fiercely and brilliantly urges that our justice movements be prepared to follow the quest for new meaning into dimensions where we might least expect to find it: in injury and vulnerability.”
Sheena Patel, Author of I’m a Fan
“I finished this book and nearly cried with relief, Klein gave me the gift of being calm. She explores and diagnoses with empathy, warmth and searing precision the confusion and utter madness of what it is to be alive right now. This is a big book with big ideas which poses the most direct questions for our times. Everyone needs to read it as a matter of urgency.”
Johann Hari, Author of Stolen Focus
“Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that prompts us to completely rethink the moment we’re in. Doppelganger helps us to understand, in a deep and tectonic way, why our society is becoming unrecognizable to us – and why so many people we know are changing in disturbing ways. It’s a book about going down a rabbit hole that becomes about the nature of the rabbit hole itself. If you want to understand where we are now – and how to find our way back to sanity – you have to read this totally brilliant book.”
Global sales
Publishing information.
Doppelganger was published simultaneously in the UK, US, and Canada in English on September 12, 2023 and is in translation in more than 10 languages so far.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, United States
Knopf Canada
Allen Lane (Penguin), UK
In ebook and audio in the U.S. by Macmillan Publishers
For more information on translation rights, please visit Inkwell Management.
2023
the Netherlands/De Geus
Italy/La Nave di Teseo
2024
Finland/Into Publishing
France/Editions Actes Sud
Japan/Iwanami
Norway/Oktober
Spain/Editorial Paidos
Sweden/Ordfronts Forlag
For more information, please visit Inkwell Management.