This title will be released on:
Aug 19, 2025
Description
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| Publish Date | August 19, 2025 |
| Pages | 160 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781644452905 |
| Dimensions | 209.6 X 139.7 X 1.0 mm | 1.0 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Praise for Whites
"Whites is a work of wild genius, and Mark Doten is an outrageously gifted writer—who else could make me fall hopelessly in love with characters so wrongheaded and bloody minded, so sweetly clueless and dangerously stupid? These stories are stunningly beautiful, dark as hell, hilarious, heartbreaking, profane, profound, and (unfortunately!) very timely. This collection makes me feel lucky to be alive at this absurd moment, if only to witness Doten’s brilliant alchemy."—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
“I am forever in awe of Mark Doten, a virtuoso stylist and ventriloquist whose visionary satires are spurred by a moral urgency that marks him as my generation's Bernhard as well our Burroughs. Whites is a pathbreaking brainderanger—blistering and prescient, sure, but let's not forget funny and dirty and extremely fucking weird.”—Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
“Mark Doten finds beauty where the rest of us despair. I heart these stories, which crown our moment.”—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
“Mark Doten’s work has always been brilliant, daring, and absolutely vital. Whites is a collection that could upend fiction, exhort nonfiction, and maybe even save us if enough of you agree.”—Dennis Cooper, author of I Wished
“Mark Doten's writing reminds me of the thankless work of anti-fascist researchers who spend their time training their focus on what many of us would rather not think about or read, let alone immerse ourselves in. Nearly unreadable. Nearly unputdownable. Gray eyed and devastating in its focus, irresistible in its craft, this fucked up book turns irony back on itself and stabs into real heart.”—Madeline ffitch, author of Stay and Fight
“Prescient about our current moment to an unsettling degree, Mark Doten’s Whites pushes satire to its farthest edge, tapping deeply into the id of American society and capturing something truly horrifying and real in the process.”—John Keene, author of Playland
Praise for Trump Sky Alpha
“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 New York Times Book Review
“Darkly hilarious.”—BOMB Magazine
“Virtuosic . . . . So attentive to the subtleties of its object of caricature that it feels almost documentary.”—The Nation
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