Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Mark Doten
Sam Lipsyte, The Art of Fiction No. 242
Interviewed by Mark Doten Photo Ceridwen Morris The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next.
Sam Lipsyte, The Art of Fiction No. 242
Interviewed by Mark Doten The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next.
Mark Doten | Pray for Q
I’ve got a rule with Mom, where if she brings up anything Q-related, we’re done. Slamming door, squealing tires, end scene. That’s been our deal for over a year. She agreed to it in an email, which I later printed out and had her sign. But she’s my mother, and it never quite works out that way. This is not about Q, she says. It’s Q adjacent, but that’s it. There’s special circumstances here, Billy, I swear to god.
Dying but It’s Something Else | Mark Doten
When your time’s up your time’s up and that’s how it’s always been. My mom used to say just throw me out on the slag heap. It was pneumonia with both her and her sister, maybe the family’s got bum lungs. But your grandfather was two days before his ninety-third, so there’s some longevity there too.
Every Soul Ever | Online Only | n+1 | Mark Doten
Image via Flickr. She works in a nursing home and she won’t get the vaccine. She’s done a lot of research. The resident in room 3 gets sick and then the resident in room 7 gets sick. There’s fertility, and there’s freedom. The resident in room 2 is carted off and vented. Not that she wants a fucking baby, but aren’t these people supposed to care about choice? The company that owns the company that owns her nursing home and eight others gets sued by some of the families.
Banana Bunch Challenge
Royal Jarmon, Banana On Fire Escape. 2019, acrylic on canvas. 20 1/10 × 16 1/10". Courtesy of the artist. Based I am a gay man and a patriot. Skirmishes with the shitlords of Kekistan notwithstanding, I believe in Trump, and I believe in the white race. 4chan has got more shills and redditors than it had on November 16, which is why I am leaving the site and entering life. I write in a house owned by my father until his death. Perhaps he still owns it in some sense, the dead man.
White Cough Genocide
Painting by Dan Lacey.
It’s German for “The Trump, The”
FLOTUS Fucking 2020. Haven’t we teached them? They are all so crazy. And I know them, how everyone is just like jumping for joy. This, I just fucking spit on it, on all of them. For years everybody’s like, “Oh, my God. this is the worst. This is the worst.” I mean, come on. What are they even talking about? They are crazy, OK? We’ll stay right here. We’re not going. We are about to win this, and they will have to cry. You want the worst? It’s my life that sucks. Fucking China. Fucking Democrat people.
Judith and Ahmed: A Story of Friendship
You know what … I was proved fucking right. That’s what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, ‘There she goes again.’ But I was proved fucking right.—Judith Miller [Chalabi] published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, in the field of abstract algebra. His Erdős number is 6.—Wikipedia And so Ahmed we had our housewarming at last.
Open for Business
Terry Eiler, Scenes from county road 804 in Floyd County, Virginia. 1978, photograph.
An interview with Tracy O’Neill and Mark Doten | Soho Press
In Tracy O’Neill’s upcoming novel, Quotients, two people search for connection in a world of fractured identities and aliases, global finance, big data, intelligence bureaucracies, algorithmic logic, and terror. MD: Quotients is many things, among them: a big, ambitious systems novel of the sort that is often stereotyped as the province of white men (e.g., David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon).
Trump Sky Alpha: A Novel
Mark Doten is the author of The Infernal. One of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists, he is the literary fiction editor at Soho Press and teaches in Columbia University’s graduate writing program. He lives in Brooklyn. “Trump Sky Alpha is 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. . . .
Sam Lipsyte , The Art of Fiction No. 242
Interviewed by Mark Doten Photo Ceridwen Morris The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next.
Futuristic fiction conjures new planets and protagonists in the age of Trump
“The City in the Middle of the Night” (Tor; 366 pages; $26.99) is the latest novel by San Francisco writer Charlie Jane Anders. Photo: Tor The City in the Middle of the Night By Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; 366 pages; $26.99) For the follow-up to “All the Birds in the Sky,” her highly acclaimed first novel for adults, Nebula Award-winner Charlie Jane Anders heads in a less whimsical, less overtly fantastical direction.
Review: 'Trump Sky Alpha,' by Mark Doten
By TOBIAS CARROLL , Special to the Star Tribune March 08, 2019 - 10:35 AM See more of the story Mark Doten’s debut novel, “The Infernal” (2015), blended a surreal and horror-tinged vision of the war in Iraq with an extended riff on the concept of the singularity, where human and artificial intelligences become inseparable.
The Post-Apocalyptic Novel Meets the Trump Presidency (Aboard a Giant Zeppelin)
The post-Twitter, post-apocalyptic world of Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms (Art by Ben Dunmore) Like many of the last century’s most compelling dramas, the Internet emerged out of anxieties about the bomb.
The Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Fiction 1.
Most novelists ignore Trump. Not Mark Doten
Breaking News Oakland teachers begin their strike this morning By Melissa Holbrook Pierson | Washington Post The past two years have occasioned a torrent of nonfiction titles about what may or may not be going on in the White House, with each chronicle burning up the charts. In 2018, five books about the president sold an impressive 2.7 million copies combined. Novels did not post anywhere near the same numbers, perhaps because in these times, facts exert all the morbid fascination we can handle.
Most novelists ignore Trump. Not Mark Doten
Breaking News Oakland teachers begin their strike this morning By Melissa Holbrook Pierson | Washington Post The past two years have occasioned a torrent of nonfiction titles about what may or may not be going on in the White House, with each chronicle burning up the charts. In 2018, five books about the president sold an impressive 2.7 million copies combined. Novels did not post anywhere near the same numbers, perhaps because in these times, facts exert all the morbid fascination we can handle.
Book World: Most novelists avoid all mentions of Donald Trump. Mark Doten went the other direction.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post Published 8:21 am CST, Wednesday, February 20, 2019 Trump Sky Alpha Trump Sky Alpha Photo: Graywolf, Handout Photo: Graywolf, Handout Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 Trump Sky Alpha Trump Sky Alpha Photo: Graywolf, Handout Trump Sky Alpha By Mark Doten Graywolf. 304 pp. $16 --- The past two years have occasioned a torrent of nonfiction titles about what may or may not be going on in the White House, with each chronicle burning up the charts.
Mark Doten - Trump Sky Alpha - in conversation with Jacob Brogan
Doten’s first novel, The Infernal, was a darkly satirical look at war that earned him a place on Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists from 2017 list. His second novel plunges into even darker territory, following a president whose streaming YouTube address—delivered as he flies his airship, the eponymous Trump Sky Alpha—provokes a nuclear war.
Trump Sky Alpha
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. Internet Humor at the End of the World On 1/28, the first commercial telephone exchange is established in New Haven, Connecticut, and a locomotive passing through Panamanian jungle links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On 1/28, a fifteen-inch snowflake falls on Fort Keogh, Montana. On 1/28, Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, curses the known and unknown worlds he’s left unconquered, and his dumb ass croaks and becomes a ghost. wow, so scare.
Announcing Issue 32
The irony of the op-ed’s depressing reemergence is that everything is an op-ed now. The op-edization of all writing should have rendered its traditional purveyors redundant. Why read a Times columnist when you can read the same opinion delivered with more style and energy almost anywhere else? But even as internet writers refine and defend and reiterate their opinions—an archipelago of converging takes—so-called traditional outlets have consolidated their influence.
Read Our New Gazette
We’re pleased to announce that Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette is now available for download. With the help of Astra Taylor (Examined Life; Zizek!) and Sarah Leonard of Dissent and the New Inquiry, we’ve put together a history, both personal and documentary, and the beginning of an analysis of the first month of the occupation.
HFM Redux, Part One
Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is a recently retired financial wizard and co-author with n+1 of Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager . We caught up with him recently on a visit to New York. HFM: I’m back in New York, thankfully only briefly. n+1: How are things in your new life? HFM: My new life is substantially more relaxing than my old life. I moved to Austin. I am enjoying a life of leisure down there. It’s amazing how little I miss New York.
#occupywallstreet
When I got off the train in the Financial District two Saturdays ago,1 the first thing I did was accidentally walk into a policeman. He and fifteen or so other policemen were standing in front of a barricade that had been set up to prevent anyone from entering Wall Street.
Brady vs. Eli: Superbowl Preview
In the NFL, teams are defined by their ability to evaluate top-tier talent at quarterback. At the “combine,” the league’s annual physical evaluation of incoming prospects, the distance between a QB’s thumb and pinky finger can cost him millions of dollars. His speed in the 40-yard dash—a distance he will run perhaps once in his career, and even then in fear for his life—can make the difference between the first round and the fifth.
On Steve Jobs
Downstairs, where the genius bar is located, is packed with humanity. It's something of a shock. I go to the Apple store on the Upper West side to replace a battery. The city is sparkling, almost too bright. We’d had an earthquake, which was almost comic, and a hurricane, which was almost not, but that was in the past. The present rolls on. Walking into an Apple store is always a bit awe-inspiring. There is the vaulted ceiling, the feeling of transcendence. The monks all wear blue T-shirts.
Back at Zuccotti Park
I went back to Zuccotti Park last night, for the first time since the 17th. Michael Moore was there, reporting for MSNBC from the corner of Liberty Street and Trinity Place. A crowd gathered around him; “down in front,” people called out, and everyone sat. Then most of them stood back up. A shot of Michael Moore sitting in a director’s chair, in a dark, possibly empty park, surrounded by a couple of security guards: apparently this does not make for good television.
N1BReading
We asked our editors what they’ve been reading lately, and almost all of us have been reading for Occupy Wall Street. We recommend Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind , the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves , and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money . We also suggest skipping your graduate school qualifying exams and traveling light.
Behold the Koreans
It takes about a generation for cars to change. Tin Lizzies that served first-generation drivers were too old-fashioned for the young buyers of Chevrolets in the 1920s. A couple of generations ago New York City’s taxi was the Checker, for the past generation it has been the American sedan, and in another decade it will be a bespoke minivan. This kind of change happens to car brands as well. Cadillac descended from the pinnacle of luxury marques into the depths of the welfare queen’s ghetto.
On Ryan Trecartin
Some artworks edify, some perplex, and some coerce, evacuating everyone who views them to a new and better reality. To watch the videos of Ryan Trecartin–“the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s,” per the New Yorker–is to be led out of a cave of ignorance by a queer, 30-year-old Socrates.
After the Olympics
For a few weeks before the Olympic Games began, my morning run route was dominated by some of the best athletes in the world. As I shuffled my way around Victoria Park in East London, track-suited Olympians sped by me, their nationalities emblazoned across their backs, their lanyards flailing in the breeze. Marketed as a way of “inspiring a generation,” the Olympics made me at least feel pretty shitty about my athleticism.
Oedipus Hipsterus
Suburban-spawned urban hipsters harbor a famous animus for suburbia. Call it the father-killing side of the Oedipal impulse whose mother-loving component is the type of nostalgia enacted in obsessive conversation about 1980s trivia or trophy dog ownership by dwellers of closet-size apartments. Of course, if the suburbs weren’t so stifling, misfit youths wouldn’t grow up to be hipsters.
Year in Review
After much flailing, the clothing store Brighton Kids, which, along with PFC (Palace Fried Chicken), defined Brighton Beach’s 6th Street, closed its doors/cardboard-curtain for good. In the early 1990s it had supplied sport-socks to immigrant children of all ages. More recently it was notable for its half-naked mannequins, suspicious old women in large coats, racks of torn sweaters with sequins and shoulder pads. In its place immediately landed a giant T-mobile store. Conspiracy theories abounded.
On Zizek and the London Riots
I mostly enjoyed Musab Younis’s article on the London riots. However, I was taken aback by the dismissive allusion to Zizek and his supposedly slightly predictable Hegelianism. Whether one likes Zizek’s writings or not, this sort of jibe strikes me as profoundly unhelpful. As Christian Lorentzen has pointed out, the one philosopher hipsters know is the Big Slovenian. That in itself does not invalidate his claims.
All the Libraries, A Stage
During one midsummer night party, Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, goes searching for his host. He wanders into a library, where a stout, spectacled man is drunkenly staring at the books. The books—not the gardens, the bottles of champagne, the lithe dancers, or the starlets under plum trees—are Gatsby’s great triumph. The library is impressive in its hyperrealism, on par with the stage sets of theater director David Belasco.
Ten Years
The easy question: Where were you? Pre-calculus. I was a senior in high school when the Towers came down. The teachers said we could go home, but school was in the Bronx, and it was unclear whether you could get back into Manhattan, where I lived. The bridges and tunnels were closed, and much of my class ended up staying with families that lived near the school. But the 1 train was running, and I was determined to see what had happened for myself. I thought I would be a reporter, or help somehow.
Stéphane Hessel at Columbia, Sept. 27
New York readers, please join us this Tuesday for a conversation with Stéphane Hessel, author of Indignez-vouz!, or Time for Outrage, moderated by Associate Editor Nikil Saval and sponsored by the Columbia University French House. Indignez-vous! is a controversial, impassioned call-to-arms for a return to the ideals that fueled the French Resistance.
Interns Launch Personals Website
The interns have asked us to share the following note about their new personals website (at npluspersonals.tumblr.com): Maybe it’s the summer breeze, lulling us into contemplation of all things romantic, or perhaps we’re just looking to forget the crises, meteorological and otherwise, that have plagued our great city these last few months. Nonetheless, our thoughts turn toward companionship as we look to bunker down for the fall.
N1BReading
After reading Lost Illusions all winter I hated the idea of youth and being young, so I turned to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim—a novel about a 25-year-old who seems to have no dreams left at all—as a corrective.
What We Should Have Known (Live!)
At 7 PM next Wednesday, October 26 at Fordham, n+1 contributors J. D. Daniels and Helen DeWitt talk frankly about regrets they have (or don’t have) about college-—what they wish they had read or not read, listened to or not listened to, thought or not thought, been or not been. The conversation is part of a series on the subject with different contributors moderated by editor Keith Gessen. The transcripts of the first two installments were published as the n+1 small book What We Should Have Known.
Second Gazette Online and in Print
Our OWS-inspired Gazette is back! The second issue arrives at the office today, with new dispatches from Oakland, questions about relations with the police, arguments about the role of the homeless, reports on the transition from general assembly to spokes council, dispatches from Zuccotti, a history of the drum circle, and much more. If you live in New York, write to us at editors [at] nplusonemag.com and we’ll let you know where you can pick up copies.
Antonio Tabucchi, 1943-2012
In a truly dark time for Italy, the death of one of its great writers is a particularly unusual cruelty. I have always wanted to be a writer, but Tabucchi was the figure whose works convinced me that it was necessary to be a writer on the left. His novel Pereira Declares (Sostiene Pereira), published in 1994, was an instant classic of political fiction, as slim and fiery as a pamphlet, but as careful and tragic as a work of art.
Toward a Dissident Architecture?
The Pritzker Prize, architecture’s would-be Nobel since 1979, generally takes on one of two assignments. The first, as with past winners Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, and Rem Koolhaas, is to confirm the status of long-established starchitects, and thereby also to affirm a certain popular enthusiasm about what architecture is and does.
Brothel, Washington DC
This floor was entirely asleep; others were roaming, and the last of us wouldn’t be back from work until nearly dawn; The Pimp (hereinafter referred to as [Name Withheld]) was snoring to the south, and the dear, 300-pound, peach-complected Commander (Navy, retired,) who owned the whorehouse, was snuggled with his boyfriend to the north. To be fair, we did not call it a whorehouse, despite the fact that escorts lived and worked here. It was simply The House.
False Nine vs. Real Nine
The unofficial propaganda about the European Championship is that it is “even harder to win than the World Cup.” This of course is crazy talk, as evidenced by the fact that Denmark and Greece—two teams that will never get a sniff of the Jules Rimet Trophy—have won the Euros.
The Trouble Is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street
Ordinarily the small books we do at n+1 are about literature, or the arts, or culture. A year ago, when I read the letters pulled together by a website called Occupy the Boardroom, I knew that we had to try to collect them so that more Americans could read them.
The Foundation Statesmen
In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his oath of office, he inherited control of a vast country with a booming population, abundant resources, the world’s largest economy, and next to nothing in the way of central government. At a time when other industrialized nations were erecting welfare states, the United States still lacked the capacity to tax most of its citizens.
Twelve Easy Pieces
Get n+1 in your inbox. On the last day of the year, we give you twelve of our favorite pieces from 2012. Christopher Glazek (“Raise the Crime Rate”) made his case for prison abolition. Elizabeth Gumport (“Female Trouble”) looked at Chris Kraus, Native Agents, and the feminist problem with privacy. Elizabeth Gumport (“Made in Manhattan”) returned to defend Lena Dunham.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Mark
Contact Mark, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack