"[Mark Doten] launches Trump Sky Alpha at the bull's eye of reality with such velocity that it bursts through the other side. This is speculative fiction as burning ring of fire." —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post
“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
“Ever read a crazy book standing up, yelping in horror, transfixed by the way it's both insane and all too real? Mark Doten’s new novel, Trump Sky Alpha, might give you this feeling, imagining as it does one logical but dark conclusion to the current administration... [Doten] is one of our keenest and most inventive prose writers working today.”
—Nathan Deuel, The Los Angeles Times
A novel about Donald Trump,
systems,
grief,
queerness, &
internet humor at the end of the world.
Published by Graywolf Press.
Listed as a most anticipated title of 2019 by The Millions, Lit Hub, NYLON, HuffPost, and Big Other
“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.... Doten assembles a perverse thing of beauty from the cruel theater of the presidency… a text that’s as much a narrative as it is a work of speculative media theory, one invested in a rigorous critique of both the Internet’s contents—the text and images it circulates, the online communities it enables—and its physical form. In particular, the novel uncovers how the Internet has enabled US colonial power to reproduce itself.” —Lisa Borst, The Nation
“Welcome Trump Sky Alpha. It is the Trump novel I’ve been waiting for... the novel Coover and Pynchon and DeLillo (yes, “and,” all of them together) would have written last century; a “systems novel” that places Trump in global and historical systems of economics and technology and yet has the plotting and verisimilitude of more narrow realistic novels about Trump by Rushdie, Lethem, Shteyngart, and Lipsyte
. . . . Trump Sky Alpha will be a much-appreciated and long-remembered introduction to a young novelist worthy of comparison to those twentieth-century old masters of American politics and literary forms.”
—Tom LeClair, Open Letters Review
“[Doten] channels the brusqueness of the president's Twitter feed into a vivid literary depiction. And this is indeed a novel where Twitter personas don't just matter: They are, in fact, at the heart of this heady work's thematic concerns. . . . Fundamentally, this is a long and thrilling meditation on information and disinformation, on personas and the elusiveness of truth.”—Tobias Carroll, The Star Tribune
“Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. 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.”—Jacob Silverman, Longreads
Excerpts in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, N+1, and Guernica.