WHITES
STORIESLinks to excerpts, interviews, and full reviews here
An Electric Lit Best Story Collection of 2025
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025
Washington Post: 30 Books To Read this Summer
Vulture: 28 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer
“In our extremist political climate and celebrity-book-club-oriented literary one, I’m glad this collection — and daring, pyrotechnically gifted, berserk-confronting authors like Doten, a vanishing breed — exist to do the real work.―Teddy Wayne, The New York Times
“As an illuminator of the dark logic of power, Mark Doten is peerless.”—Will Chancellor, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“One of our great contemporary satirical novelists.”—Emily Temple, Literary Hub
“There are some bangers in here. The whole book is worth reading just for 'I'm Wide Awake It's Jumpman,’ which is a masterpiece."— Anthony Jeselnik, #NewBookTuesday
“If I need a break and I want a good time to laugh at the whites, Mark Doten has me perfect.”—Traci Thomas, The Stacks
“Whites offers both an ethnography and evisceration of white hegemony: from white supremacist school shooters and Q-anon conspirators, to white liberals in denial about the violence they perpetuate.... Doten’s searing critique is sharpened by humor, internet fluency, and self-awareness.... He positions whiteness as a condition of obliterative self-pity, one that cannot be expunged through efforts to be labeled as “one of the good ones.”―Electric Literature
“[Doten] pulls just as few punches and experiments just as wildly in this collection of stories that attempt to capture the more demented and dismaying aspects of Americans at one another’s throats and terminally online.”―The Washington Post
“Doten is a skilled satirist, and this collection matches the disorienting comic tenor of their previous novels, Trump Sky Alpha and The Infernal.”―Emma Alpern, Vulture
"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
“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 Counternarratives
“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
“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
“Doten delivers an uncompromising satire of contemporary white supremacy in this bold collection...Every character is painfully convincing in their anger, condescension, or meekness. It’s a wild and caustic ride.”―Publishers Weekly
“These venomous, discomforting stories may soon feel ‘of their time,’ but what a time. Imagine the white malaise of Sam Lipsyte and the heightened satire of Gary Shteyngart shot through with a tab of Mark Leyner’s hyperstylized metafiction. Maybe that’s the right frame of mind to ask what white people are really made of, these days. A consciously caustic critique of white fragility that means to leave a mark.”―Kirkus Reviews