Machine

A local girl drowns one night in summer on the shore. As a seething guilt settles over the teenagers of this fractured town, another girl narrates the experience of their hard­ partying, fiercely divided collective. Her parents' marriage violently collapsing, her brother spiralling into increasing destructiveness, she sinks further back into the events leading up to this tragedy and the deeper fault-lines in the community.

Daringly experimental, Machine is a bold interrogation of gender, class and privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. A thrilling first novel from a unique talent, this is suspenseful, audacious, riveting literary fiction.

'Raw, undeniable power... A brilliant read' - Daisy Johnson

About the Author :
Susan Steinberg is the author of Spectacle, Hydroplane, and The End of Free Love. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Review :
There is innovation and beauty and exactitude in language here but there is also raw, undeniable power and rage. A brilliant read This summer's real powerhouse... If you like your prose propulsive, unflinching and disturbing, this is going to be the one for you 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 Machine is a work of boldness and singularity that is both deeply affecting and brilliantly written. Her slim narrative of adolescent crisis is as propulsive as it is disorienting, subverting expectations at every turn 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 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 An astonishment, a work of dazzlingly poetic prose that propels us through darkness and flashing light into the furthermost recesses of thought and feeling. Susan Steinberg has done it again-produced another breakthrough for modern fiction The narrative shifts, experimental structure and poetic language in Steinberg's hypnotic first novel capture the teen years with their shifting emotional tides and heightened awareness of class, gender, self and others Steinberg writes in small, interconnected, and poetic fragments...Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant Steinberg is an undersung genius, and her elliptical novel about one tragic summer - a girl, a drowning - should be a modern classic in the vein of Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson. What makes [Machine] so thrilling is Steinberg's artistry with form; she fractures narrative into its fundamental parts. 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 Her prose is urgent and fluid...The reader, unsure of which result to expect, is driven to attend to each word as if it might suddenly catch on fire....Machine is less a novel than a parable, one to be acted out again and again while women shake their heads in glum recognition and men plod along, indifferent. Steinberg's beautifully structured sentences and wholly original stylistic decisions give Machine a delicate intricacy that enhances the depth of the plot Taut, incantatory sentences, often laid out like poems After making waves with her book Spectacle, bold stylist Susan Steinberg resurfaces with her first novel, a tale of gender, class, privilege and trauma set during a summer at the shore. . . . The narrative grapples with guilt and blame while eschewing formal conventions Susan Steinberg takes everything you loved about her short story collections (Spectacle, anyone?) and brings them to this new tragedy: a hazy summer night in which one girl drowned. The voice of the story, sometimes singular, sometimes with other echoes, will guide and haunt you as it tries to make sense of what happened Steinberg's writing sinks its teeth in down to the bone and refuses to release Peril, fury, suspicion, rebellion, Steinberg's craft lies in accumulating these moods and sustaining them. . . . It's a bold and challenging way to make a book, to trust the reader to sit still for her own impalement. But the risk pays off. Machine embodies a new kind of novel in verse, a creature that's part stutter and part song, and its stark, strange melody echoes long after its musicians have packed up and gone home With simple, lyrical language, Steinberg presents a mystery of privilege and youth that deftly captures the unadulterated gear quaking deep behind a teenager's invincible front