Publisher’s Description:

Twice a week, the President pilots his ultra-luxury airship Trump Sky Alpha (seats start at $50,000) between DC, NYC, and Mar-a-Lago, delivering, as he travels, a streaming YouTube address to the nation, trumpeting his successes and blasting his enemies—until the day his words plunge the world into nuclear war. One year later, with ninety percent of the world’s population decimated, a journalist named Rachel, grieving for her lost wife and daughter, and living an emotionally numb existence in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone, is offered an assignment by her old editor: to document the jokes that made their way around the internet in the final moments before the end.

What she uncovers, hidden amid spiraling memes and twitter jokes in a working archive of the internet’s remnants, are references to a little-known novel, The Subversive, that seemed to have predicted the world’s end, and the traces of a shadowy hacktivist group known as the Aviary. The actions of the Aviary, and the enigmatic presence a figure known only as Birdcrash, take on immense and terrifying dimensions as Rachel ventures further into the ruins of the internet.

Mark Doten, a satirist of unparalleled vision, brilliantly details how the internet has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, laying the groundwork for the tumult of our current political moment, and, in the kaleidoscopic, queer, all-consuming, parallactic swirl of Trump Sky Alpha, for the future headed our way.

"[Mark Doten] launches Trump Sky Alpha at the bull's eye of reality with such velocity that it bursts through the other side. This is speculative fiction as burning ring of fire."—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post


“Ever read a crazy book standing up, yelping in horror, transfixed by the way it's both insane and all too real? Mark Doten’s new novel, Trump Sky Alpha, might give you this feeling, imagining as it does one logical but dark conclusion to the current administration... [Doten] is one of our keenest and most inventive prose writers working today.”
—Nathan Deuel, The Los Angeles Times

“Doten [is] a virtuosic satirist. . . . This is bracingly good satire, so attentive to the subtleties of its object of caricature that it feels almost documentary....  Doten assembles a perverse thing of beauty from the cruel theater of the presidency… a text that’s as much a narrative as it is a work of speculative media theory, one invested in a rigorous critique of both the Internet’s contents—the text and images it circulates, the online communities it enables—and its physical form. In particular, the novel uncovers how the Internet has enabled US colonial power to reproduce itself.” —Lisa Borst, The Nation

“Welcome Trump Sky Alpha.  It is the Trump novel I’ve been waiting for... the novel Coover and Pynchon and DeLillo (yes, “and,” all of them together) would have written last century; a “systems novel” that places Trump in global and historical systems of economics and technology and yet has the plotting and verisimilitude of more narrow realistic novels about Trump by Rushdie, Lethem, Shteyngart, and Lipsyte
. . . . Trump Sky Alpha will be a much-appreciated and long-remembered introduction to a young novelist worthy of comparison to those twentieth-century old masters of American politics and literary forms.”

—Tom LeClair, Open Letters Review


“Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what . . . the internet actually means to our society.”—Jacob Silverman, Longreads




Trump Sky Alpha is the first and last Trump novel I’ll ever want to read.”The Millions

A.M. Homes

“Doten's cracked archaeology of the nearly-now is so brilliant it will make you joyful despite yourself, despite the world's self.”
Rivka Galchen

“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

"With resplendent, even lurid detail, Trump Sky Alpha unpacks every contemporary source of American anxiety.... 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

Miguel Syjuco

Alexandra Kleeman

Edmund White

A novel about  Donald Trump, the secret history of the Internet, and the end of the world.

Excerpts in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists issue and  N+1.

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