Welcome into the Mirror World: where conspiracy is reality, fiction is fact, left is right, and you may not even recognize yourself. Naomi’s ninth book is her most personal.
About
the Book
The Book
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, will be published in the US, Canada and the UK on September 12, 2023.
Doppelganger is a guidebook for our unsettling age, inviting all of us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters. Braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, Naomi Klein dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.
About the Book
The Book
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, will be published in the US, Canada and the UK on September 12, 2023.
Doppelganger is a guidebook for our unsettling age, inviting all of us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters. Braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, Naomi Klein dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.
About the Book
Description
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Global
Sales
Publishing
Information
Doppelganger will be published simultaneously in English on September 12, 2023 and in translation later in 2023 and early 2024.
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, please visit Inkwell Management.
Global Sales
Publishing Information
Doppelganger will be published simultaneously in English on September 12, 2023 and in translation later in 2023 and early 2024.
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, please visit Inkwell Management.