Sensation Machines

Sensation Machines
Adam Wilson
RRP:
NZ$ 35.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 28.00
Paperback
h190 x 127mm
8 Jun 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781641292863
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Michael and Wendy Mixner are a 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 data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator 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. An endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, Sensation Machines is a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, revolutionary desires, and a broken justice system. Adam Wilson implicates not only the powerbrokers gaming the system and getting rich at the intersection of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Capitol Hill, but all of us- each one of us playing our parts, however willingly or unwillingly, in the vast systems that define and control our lives.
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 "Sensation Machines is pitch dark and pitch perfect--a whip-smart take on marriage, capitalism, grief, and loneliness in a farcical, not-so-distant future. Adam Wilson effortlessly toggles between wry humor and genuine existential dread; the result is lyrical and lewd, brilliant and bleak. " --Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light"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 are 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 Book of Numbers "Sensation Machines is part techno-political thriller, part social satire, and part family drama, and it succeeds wonderfully on all fronts. The book is smart, funny, and fast-paced, with lots to say about the mess we' re in, but the thing that has stayed with me is its heart. Adam Wilson exemplifies that old Pynchonian dictum: Keep cool, but care. " --Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts"Wilson' s observations are often sharp-witted, extracting humor from sources like video game addiction, cryptocurrency, and herd mentality . . . as Michael and Wendy' s marriage fractures, the author carefully braids their individual narratives to a satisfying, if inevitable, crescendo. This feels all too real. " --Publisher' s Weekly "A deft juxtaposition of contemporary American classes on par with Richard Price' s Lush Life. " --Kirkus Reviews "A delayed bildungsroman for a whole generation . . . It draws upon Occupy Wall Street, criticisms of neoliberalism, the affronts represented by the presidency of Donald Trump, and New York cultural mainstays . . . As its earnest leads laud fairness but establish themselves as the greatest impediments to progress, Sensation Machines nods to the adage that, the more circumstances change, the more they stay the same. " --Foreword Reviews"Adam Wilson' s new novel is the first entry in a genre we might soon call ' American pre-topianism' . . . There' s grappling with internalized misogyny, hedge funds collapsing, treatises on Eminem, and oodles of invasive technology, and at the center of it all are Michael, Wendy, and a murder that might upend the whole country' s order. If each generation has a defining emotional bearing, like Gen X' s stranglehold on apathy, and the Boomers' late-stage lurch from idealism into me-me Zen selfishness, Wilson posits the Elder Millennials (the Oregon Trail Generation) are perhaps defined by a strange sort of grief--an unshakable hope in the hopeless. It' s the kind of book that' s hyper of-the-times in order to understand recent history, and Sensation Machines understands America so well it' s almost mean. " --Chris Lee, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI
Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, which was an Indie Next Pick and a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, as well as the short story collection What' s Important is Feeling. A recipient of the The Paris Review' s Terry Southern Prize for Humor, his work has appeared in Harper' s, Tin House, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Wilson has taught in the creative writing programs at Columbia and NYU. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781641292863
Published: 8 Jun 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Soho Press
Publisher: Soho Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 190mm
Width: 127mm
Pages: 1

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