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

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 "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,