Staff Pick
Steinberg ventures into a novel for the first time in her brilliant writing career and delivers a strange, fiery, and obliterated story of a broken family, teen drama, and a mysterious drowning. Like her freaking awesome short fiction, this is a reading experience that will make your brain pop. Recommended By Kevin S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A haunting story of guilt and blame in the wake of a drowning, the first novel by the author of Spectacle
Susan Steinberg's first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers — both locals and wealthy out-of-towners — during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.
A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that race down the page. This restless approach gains focus and power through a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel — relentless and bold — that only Susan Steinberg could have written.
Review
"Steinberg shifts backward and forward in time, just as her prose shifts into a kind of poetry. The result is a glittering, knifelike reflection of despair through the eyes of a young woman, made richer by the fact that it's told in hindsight." The New Yorker
Review
"Susan Steinberg is a conventions-defying, form-innovating wizard of a writer, and I already can't wait to reread her newest book, Machine. Unique, astounding, and terribly and splendidly moving, this novel is a revelation." R. O. Kwon
Review
"Otherworldly, and every-other-line sublime, Machine reads like the text messages Laura Palmer might send back from the Black Lodge. It's a timely reminder of why our culture remains haunted by dead girls, and of the different ways we find to drown them." Bennett Sims
Review
"Steinberg writes prose with a poet's sense of meter and line, and a velocity recalling the novels of Joan Didion. The result is a dizzying work that perfectly evokes the feeling of spinning out of control." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Susan Steinberg is the author of the short-story collections Hydroplane and The End of Free Love. She was the 2010 United States Artists Ziporyn Fellow in Literature. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney' s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, and The Massachusetts Review, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, Yaddo, and New York University. She has a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.