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Sensation Machines Hardcover – July 7, 2020

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 33 ratings

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A razor-sharp, darkly funny, and deeply human rendering of a Post-Trump America in economic free fall
 
Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: he lost the couple’s life savings when a tanking economy caused a major market crash. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to solve a national crisis of mass unemployment and 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.

Set in an economic dystopia that’s just around the corner, 
Sensation Machines is both an endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, and a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, wearable tech, 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.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Sensation Machines

“Reads a little bit like Tom Wolfe in a futurist dystopia. There are full-throated riffs on materialism and tech surveillance, on simulation video gaming, white privilege and the lyrics of Eminem. A spirit of exhilaration fires the book’s best moments. We may be going to hell, but at least it’s fun to rant about.”
The Wall Street Journal

“A witty, incisive commentary on the fallout from a generation betrayed by the promise of the American dream that, it turns out, masked a foundation of greed, broken social structures, and the topsy-turvy values of capitalism first.”
—The Daily Beast

“Brilliant . . . Peel [it] one away, and it’s a paranoid near-future thriller with a deep swirl of dark humor circling around it . . . Wilson is a stylist with few contemporaries.”
Inside Hook

Sensation Machines might be set in the near future, but the concerns that fuel its plot—systemic racism, economic anxiety, and corporatist entities looking to sink laws that could lead to real change—feel decidedly relevant in 2020 . . . The characters are grappling for a better life; they’re also trying hard to keep their souls intact. And in the not-so-distant future, pulling that last one off is even harder than it is today.”
Tor.com

“Despite the book’s current relevance,
Sensation Machines could have also been published a decade ago, alongside post-Great Recession, New York novels like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, which engage in similar humorous yet sad searches for the heart of a thoroughly mediated world . . . Yet Wilson’s various gadgets are secondary to more lasting concerns of love, grief, inequality, and uncertainty. Wilson wants to believe that human connection, though refracted by capitalism, branding, crises, and augmented reality visors, has not been degraded, that it is not a thing of the nostalgic past or the utopian future but a constant possibility, if we can just stop playing characters in someone else’s game long enough to create it." 
Full Stop

“For a book set in the near-future,
Sensation Machines feels pretty damn current. Social upheaval, antisemitism and class wars swirl in the background of the high-intensity novel.”
—Hey Alma

"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

"Wilson delights with his pop-culture savvy, crisp prose, and unapologetic observations of revolutionary aspirations."
 —
Booklist

"[A] biting comedy of a post-Trump America . . . A murder, next-gen tech, videogame addiction and every kind of illegal drug figure into Wilson's lulu of a plot, but the pleasure here is the sharpness of Wilson's prose, his observant satire and the richly evocative feelings of loss." 
Shelf Awareness

"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

About the Author

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. His is the recipient of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for Humor, and 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Soho Press (July 7, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1641291656
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1641291651
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.74 x 1.23 x 8.54 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 33 ratings

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Adam Wilson
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Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, among many other publications. In 2012 he received the Terry Southern Prize, which recognizes "wit, panache, and sprezzatura" in work published by The Paris Review. He teaches creative writing at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

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4.2 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2021
    Enjoyable commentary on life and extremely well written. Highly recommended.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2020
    Timing is all when it comes to a publishing date, and this cautionary tale of speculative dystopia would have had a stronger impact had it been published a year earlier, pre-pandemic. However, since there are forces at work in the real world that render the dangers put forth here irrelevant, this can only be read as an entertainment, and it delivers on that very well.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020
    This book is a total stunner.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2020
    I think this novel has a fantastic premise and the writing is smart and entertaining. That said, it's hard to say if readers should approach it as a satire or crime drama. A lot of questions remain unanswered and I prefer clearer resolutions.
  • Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2021
    So often we are presented with futuristic dystopian novels that rely on boarding a narrative train whose tracks are worn down by the jet-set cars that have traveled on the tracks before them. They’re boringly similar. Then, we read books that divert from those tropes like Cormac McCarthy whose world presents a cannibalistic horror embodied by Alex Jones who unintentionally commented on his own potential cannibalistic future and didn’t realize there was a connection until he saw the movie on DVD, wished he had seen it at the movie theater, and opined on its nonfiction narrative of the future.

    But then, at times, there comes a unique dystopian story unlike those that came before it. A story that portrays a nonfiction of our current horror by portraying life just as it is. In a way, presenting the Alex Jones presenting his narrative about cryptocurrencies and wishing for a cannibalistic future rather than constructing a new world to fear.

    Adam Wilson’s Sensation Machines is just that. A dystopian present of complex characters examining the various ways we are shackled to the narrative train of our horrific present. Our fears of poverty, sexual repression, the reality of indulging in our urges, living with a lack of purpose, the potential lack of support when you learn you don’t know someone as well as you think you do, and so many more existential terrors build this beautifully written character-driven novel.

    The book is a slant-portrait of our current age and hinges deeply on the social unrest we are currently experiencing on a daily basis. Our artificial intelligence, artificial currency, post-occupy wall street world sets the oculus stage for Wendy and Michael Mixner’s doomed marriage, and we are pulled into the terror and delusion of their lives reflecting a stark, ironic ennui of our era. Murder, drugs, sex, technology, and the fleeting value of what we spend our whole lives working for are presented in a striking mirror to the experiences of the past twenty years as if anything could be done to pull us up from drowning in modern existence.

    This was an incredible book, and Wilson’s methodology in approaching his story makes it difficult to pigeonhole it into any single given genre. His prose is taut, his characters are as solid as you and I but with souls and neuroses as shivery as a Roz Chast gags, and with thematic implications that accuse all of us of insatiably charging forward into a future that is sure to work us to death if we don’t kill one another first. Everything is fleeting, of course, but Wilson’s novel has an uncanny ability to effortlessly set us on the cheese-grater of the hedonistic cycle alongside his tragic characters, and like them, we are completely unaware of it until it is much too late.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020
    I read S.M. at the request of a friend of the author, and am grateful for the tip.
    Sensation Machines is a book for our time. One swipes the pages. No word has a deep meaning. Every affect connects to a social status-defining corporate product There is no promise of redemption. The plot is a sophisticated lesson in marketing suitable for business school.
    If marketing is a science, then this is a science fiction, murder mystery novel. Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) invented modern marketing a century ago as propaganda in peacetime, to sell people not what they need, but what they want which is higher social status. Every brand is a status symbol.
    Adam Wilson (bless him) makes clear the perfidious impact of narrative art in the service of corporate profit. His characters are financialists plying their pitiless trade in today's New York City of high net worth, low human value capitalism. The culture of status-driven posing and pretense seems only accelerated from the Manhattan of my college years in New York City 60 years ago, when alcohol was legal at 18 and the only drug white kids needed to score was on two legs.
    I read defensively at first. I found the characters too shallow to pity or to loathe. Then I became frightened for the innocent victim of a police narrative contrived to convince the public that the police had solved a murder. I realized that the product placement establishes the banality of each character, depriving each of his or her mythology. In Manhattan, Darth Vader uses deodorant. The uber corporate creep’s private bathroom stocks only generic products. At the top of the heap, one no longer needs status symbols. Hitler liked to pose among his decorated generals wearing a business suit.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2020
    A New York story, a marriage story, a story of what could very well become our near-future. I found it both to be a page-turner, and a novel where I found myself re-reading passages and sentences, because so many of them were beautifully done. Wilson weaves together a handful of voices masterfully. I found myself frustrated each time a Michael or Wendy chapter would end and switch perspectives: I wanted more! But alas, I had to wait another chapter to re-visit Michael or Wendy on their dark adventures.
    2 people found this helpful
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