Advance Praise for Trump Sky Alpha

“In Trump Sky Alpha, satirist and cultural commentator Mark Doten writes of a future so near—that it is today. What I used to think of as the absurdity of the everyday has progressed to the dementia of the everyday—the fractured, broken, idea of America, of reality, of truth. Doten has located himself at the center of the time warp in which we lose track of what was terra firma just yesterday, the rubble of the American social, political system, and he has writ it as dramedy. Trump Sky Alpha delivers a world where Doten has read the culture, the warning signs and is delivering us 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

“With resplendent, even lurid detail, Trump Sky Alpha unpacks every contemporary source of American anxiety—the weaponization of data, maximized nationalism, trolls, memes, wars, and most of all the unflagging human desire for love and sincerity and truth when it seems every kind of language has been a blunted into a joke. 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

“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

“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

“Doten’s cracked archaeology of the nearly-now is so brilliant it will make you joyful despite yourself, despite the world’s self. Trump Sky Alpha mysteriously makes you miss the most superfluous plagues and pleasures of the internet. An exceptional and moving and very funny book, as well as a good old who-what-why-dunit.”

—Rivka Galchen

“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!) One thing is for sure: Trump Sky Alpha does what only good literature can do best, goading us into that confronting conversation we must have about how we allowed our world to get this way, and where it may yet go.”

—Miguel Syjuco

“Trump Sky Alpha offers a vision of America that shimmers with surreal possibility, an incandescent and intellectually voracious novel of the Now in the guise of near-future science-fictional noir. A master of voice, splice, and Ackerian poetics, 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