Politics and Prose
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Mark Doten — Whites: Stories - with Shannon Sanders
Posted
August 22, 2025
Views
556
Likes
17
Engagement
3.06%
August 22, 2025
556
17
3.06%
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1:01:12Now PlayingWatch author Mark Doten's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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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.
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.
Doten is in conversation with Shannon Sanders. Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.
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