Whites
By Mark Doten
Abrams/Overlook Press, October 28, 2025
Corrosive stories about the insatiable logic of whiteness, by one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
The excoriating stories in Mark Doten’s brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten’s stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time. They run the political spectrum from “well-intentioned” liberals and newly woke CEOs to Trump appointees, QAnon adherents, and believers in replacement theory. There is an anti-vax nursing home employee, an anti-woke billionaire, a nonbinary sneaker podcaster turned January 6 insurrectionist, a nonprofit LA housing president dubbed “WORST KAREN EVER,” an elderly Republican in denial of his COVID-19 diagnosis, teenage YouTubers responding to a shooting at their suburban Minnesota school, a demonically possessed cookie manufacturer drafting a BLM statement with his new Black employee, and a gay White supremacist figure who may be a joke on 4chan, but will have his revenge.
While their identities and allegiances differ, all of them are united by a ferocious belief in themselves, certain that everything they’ve done can be justified, if you’ll just hear them out. In Whites, Doten has written a relentless book that confirms their standing as one of the great satirists of their generation.
Praise for Trump Sky Alpha
“Trump Sky Alpha is a funny book and a sad one, a bright one and a dark one, a distant sci-fi dystopia and a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. . . . The book acts both as a novel and as a searching, tortured position paper on the use of media, message and, especially, satire in our time.” –Ben Greenman, The New York Times Book Review
“Doten [is] a virtuosic satirist. . . . This is bracingly good satire, so attentive to the subtleties of its object of caricature that it feels almost documentary.” –The Nation
“What Doten uncovers with [Trump Sky Alpha] is the always pulsating anxieties that fuel our current existence, both online and off, and the ways in which we use irreverence and cynicism as armor against what we know is largely an uncaring world.” –NYLON
“It’s a darkly hilarious novel that managers to do what many thought impossible: satirize the age of Twitter and Trump.” –BOMB
“Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what . . . the internet actually means to our society.” –Longreads
About the Author
Mark Doten is the author of Trump Sky Alpha and The Infernal. One of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists, they are an editor at Soho Press and have taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. They live in Princeton, New Jersey and Mexico City.
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