Whites: Stories

by Mark Doten

Overview

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

ISBN-13:	9781644452905
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the 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.

Editorial Reviews

2025-05-30
Fair warning: Never underestimate the self-importance of delusional white people. Or, just white people.

After tackling authoritarian-doomed near-futures in two pyrotechnical novels, Doten turns his lens on the real perpetrators of postmodern collapse. These 14 dynamic stories take a jaundiced look at the most comfortable, most privileged demographic in all of history—from their perspective, to acid effect. The book opens with a grotesque monologue by Elon Musk in “Even Elon on Human Meat,” while later in the book, his so-called boss tosses around the idea of using nuclear weapons against Covid-19 in “Open for Business.” Doten takes a different approach to the idea of both sides in “Pray for Q,” in which a queer artist meets his conspiracy-minded mother for a tense meal, only to flip over to her deranged mindset for the story’s fatal back half. Meanwhile in “Dying but It’s Something Else,” a son on the verge of a nervous collapse and his casually racist father talk about everything, anything but the truth. There are young voices, too, if strange and misguided ones, from the basement-dwelling white nationalist in “Banana Bunch Challenge,” to the unstable podcaster in “I’m Wide Awake It’s Jumpman” who leans into a modern patois of gamespeak, on-mic persona, and cultural schizophrenia. Every whitey is welcome here, from the Greek chorus of “J6ers” to self-delusional expats in “Fifty Thousand Gringos” to the self-described “Worst Karen Ever” in the title track. 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