Brooklyn Author's New Novel Set in Post-Pandemic New York City

New York, NY — Unlike some dystopian tales, American author Adam Wilson’s latest novel, Sensation Machines, is not set in the far-distant future, but rather in the immediate future, giving a glimpse into a Post-Trump America in an economic free fall.

Wilson will be speaking about his book at several upcoming events in New York, including on Aug. 2 at Books Beneath the Bridge, on Aug. 18 at the Bryant Park Reading Series, and on Sept. 7 at the Powerhouse Arena. The events are in-person and free, but registration is required for the Powerhouse Arena event.

The story centers around Michael and Wendy Mixner, a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is keeping a secret: he lost the couple’s life savings when a tanking economy caused a major market crash. Meanwhile, Wendy is a digital marketing strategist who has been hired onto a data-mining project, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to solve a national crisis of mass unemployment by offering universal basic income to all Americans, an idea that many consider dangerous and un-American.

Sensation Machines — first published in the United States in April 2020 by Soho Press with a paperback edition coming out on Sept. 7 — 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. Wilson implicates not only the powerbrokers gaming the system and getting rich at the intersection of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue 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.

“Sensation Machines reads a bit like Tom Wolfe in a futurist dystopia,” wrote Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal book critic. “A spirit of exhilaration fires the book’s best moments.”

Sensation Machines considers the ramifications of 9/11, which set forth a change in values, a political radicalization that shows no signs of slowing down, and a series of economic crashes that coincided with the digital overhaul of our personal and social lives.

“Sensation Machines, like works by George Orwell, William Gibson, Octavia E. Butler or Cormac McCarthy, might be labeled ‘dystopian’ because you badly want to believe it can only exist on the page, but deep down, you fear it could easily come true,” wrote Jason Diamond for Inside Hook. “Wilson is a stylist with few contemporaries.”

A native of Boston and son of the novelist Jonathan Wilson, Adam Wilson now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. His previous books include a story collection, What’s Important Is Feeling (2014), and the novel Flatscreen (2012), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is also a critic whose work has appeared in Harper’s, Bookforum, and 4Columns. In 2012, he received the Terry Southern Prize for Humor from The Paris Review.

UPCOMING EVENTS

8/2 NEW YORK

Books Beneath the Bridge with Justin Taylor and Tracy O’Neill

8/18 NEW YORK

Bryant Park reading series

9/7 NEW YORK

PowerHouse Books with Christian Lorentzen

9/13 WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lost City Books

9/14 PHILADELPHIA

The Hand and The Hand (with Meredith Westgate)