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 replacemen...

A novel on the political madness of our time and the Internet's deep workings, by the author of The Infernal.Twice a week, the president pilots his ultraluxury airship Trump Sky Alpha (seats start at $50,000), delivering, as he travels between D.C., New York City, and Mar-a-Lago, a streaming YouTube address to the nation, in which he trumpets his successes and blasts his enemies—until the day his words plunge the world into nuclear war. One year later, wit...

In the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know?In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults.Over the course of four days, a...