Sensation Machines - Hardcover

Wilson, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1641291656 ISBN 13: 9781641291651

Publisher: Soho Press, 2020

Synopsis

Set in a near-future New York City, where the ubiquity of automation has caused mass unemployment and a major market crash, Sensation Machines is by turns a portrait of a marriage in decline, a murder mystery, and a panoramic vision of a post-Trump economic dystopia.

Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Jewish Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of their daughter's stillbirth. Michael, a Wall Street trader, has secretly lost the couple's life savings. Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a Cambridge Analytica­–style data mining project, whose mysterious owner has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple—and the country.
 
Sensation Machines inhabits the perspectives of the Wall Street bros, the marketing mad men, the Silicon Valley sociopaths—and uncomfortably humanizes them, while considering the ways everyone is complicit in the consequences of late capitalism. Sensation Machines is a novel of big ideas, intricate plotting, and keenly observed human drama.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Wilson is the author of the short story collection What's Important is Feeling and the novel Flatscreen. His stories  have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and Flatscreen was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and an Indie Next Pick and was translated into German and Italian. Wilson has taught in the creative writing programs at Columbia and NYU. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. Visit him online at adamwilsonwriter.com.

Review

Praise for Sensation Machines

"With remarkable grace and wit, Adam Wilson puts the stethoscope to our national heart and diagnoses our deepest ills."
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations
 
"Adam Wilson is a prose savant, and Sensation Machines is a not-so-small miracle. With its precise details about our current moment, profusion of voice and sound, Wilson's new novel brings to mind everyone from Saul Bellow to Paul Beatty, Grace Paley to Zadie Smith. But his ideas and his syntax and his humor is entirely his. This is a great book by one of our funniest smartest sharpest contemporary novelists."
—Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West and Boomer 1
 
"Sensation Machines is precision-engineered to entertain, enlighten, and unsettle. Adam Wilson is a master craftsman with a globe-sized heart."
—Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1641291656
• ISBN 13: 9781641291651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384