"[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."
The Washington Post
“One of our keenest and most inventive prose writers.”
The Los Angeles Times
“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.”
The Nation
“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.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Trump Sky Alpha is the first and last Trump novel I’ll ever want to read.”
The Millions
“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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus
"Doten’s debut is the most audaciously imaginative political novel I’ve ever read... the sheer poundage of originality is remarkable."
The New York Times Book Review
"Kurt Vonnegut took on the Second World War. Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller grappled with Vietnam. In the same spirit of dark comedy and riotous satire, Doten powerfully reimagines our latest American adventure."
The Los Angeles Times
"A screaming hysterical novel of protest, the kind rarely seen since the heyday of Thomas Pynchon... This is our legacy writ large and scrambled."
The Daily Beast
"[A] prodigious, provocative debut. . . . Touched by brilliance throughout."
The Washington Post
"Doten has created an impressionistic map of the atomized imperial realities of the War on Terror, and it is every bit as harrowing to consider as the inane and bloodthirsty era it depicts."
The Believer
THE SOURCE / oratorio
Composed by Ted Hearne
Libretto by Mark Doten
Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival
Performances at SF Opera, LA Opera,and the Music Theatre NOW festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands
Album from New Amsterdam Records
![]()
“A 21st-century masterpiece.”Composed by Ted Hearne
Libretto by Mark Doten
Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival
Performances at SF Opera, LA Opera,and the Music Theatre NOW festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands
Album from New Amsterdam Records
The New York Times
“It evokes our time, the age of atomized digitized information, more potently than any piece of music I’ve heard.”
The Nation
“A complex mirror image of an information-saturated, mass-surveillance world, [that] remains staggering in its impact....The Source, based on a libretto by Mark Doten, is a mesmerizing and disquieting collage of vocal, instrumental, and recorded sounds.”
The New Yorker
“Some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre.”
Pitchfork
“[An] ambitious, bewildering, stealthily shattering new oratorio about Chelsea Manning and her disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.... It offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism—film and television have that covered—but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.”
The New York Times
“[H]arrowing.... Mark Doten’s libretto is drawn directly from those leaked documents and from the chat log of Pfc. Manning and the hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned her in. But this is no ripped-from-the-headlines documentary; rather, Mr. Hearne creates an environment of chaos and disorientation that gradually and excruciatingly envelops the listener.”
The Wall Street Journal