2/19/19
Forthcoming from Graywolf Press
A novel about Donald Trump, the secret history of the Internet, and the end of the world.
Listed as a most anticipated title of 2019 by The Millions, Lit Hub, NYLON, HuffPost, Big Other, and the International Business Times
“A blistering and heartbreaking satire. . . . By turns a dystopian nightmare, a cyber thriller, a spot-on treatise on memes, and a tragic tale of love and loss. . . . Featuring a not-so-distant future, Doten’s novel is haunting, incisive, and surprisingly touching.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Trump Sky Alpha is the first and last Trump novel I’ll ever want to read.”
—The Millions
“Trump Sky Alpha delivers fiction as original as it is provocative, and as plausible and illustrative of what is happening around us as any breaking news report. Read this book and then duck and cover.”
—A.M. Homes
“Doten's cracked archaeology of the nearly-now is so brilliant it will make you joyful despite yourself, despite the world's self.”
—Rivka Galchen
“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
“To enshrine in such beauty and intelligence a country that so despises beauty and intelligence is an act of rogue hope and antic compassion. In Trump Sky Alpha, Mark Doten emerges as the shadow president of our benighted generation of American literature.”
—Joshua Cohen
"With resplendent, even lurid detail, Trump Sky Alpha unpacks every contemporary source of American anxiety.... Mark Doten is a brave and audacious spelunker of the most putrid caves of internet-addled capitalism—he's a marvel and a freak of the highest order.”
—Catherine Lacey
“[An] unconventional and darkly satirical mix of memes, Twitter jokes, Q&As, and tightly written stream-of-consciousness passages. . . . Doten’s speculative tale is very strange and chilling, subversive and surreal, and disturbingly relevant.”
—Booklist
"Mark Doten brings a hilarious, subversive eye to the way we live, joke, and tweet at the edge of what could, for all we know, be an explosive end.”
—Alexandra Kleeman
“What an extraordinary novel—gutsy, astute, frightening, and fun; only history will show if it remains speculative or proves prescient. (Either way, may the gods save us!)”
—Miguel Syjuco
“This macabre vision of a future America presents a frighteningly real scenario and brings into focus the pervasive yet inane power of politicians and the Internet.”
—Library Journal
“It’s a commonplace that no one could satirize Trump. But Mark Doten has done it in this scathing, hectic portrayal of the end of the world.”
—Edmund White
Excerpts in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists and N+1.