Whites
Stories

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.
About this 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.
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
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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