The Millions

Too Beautifully Sinister Not to Indulge: The Millions Interviews Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson’s second novel, Sensation Machines, opens on Michael and Wendy, a couple desperate to eradicate their home of bedbugs, and from there the novel quickly swoops and swarms to include a murder, a corporate conspiracy, a world-changing invention, and the rampant disquiet of global economic pressures. It’s a novel based in relationships that sprawls to a worldly view.

Wilson’s debut, Flatscreen, showcased an intrepid youth fighting through a haze of drugs and dashed sexual hopes, and his story collection, What’s Important Is Feeling, followed a host of pseudo-adults through tough though often hilarious moments. Sensation Machines likewise deals out its fair share of sad people in sad existences, but it also uncovers how much our society informs our behavior, how inundated we are by technology, and how beset we are with problems of our own making.

Wilson’s work has appeared in , , and . The brilliance of is in the author’s smooth and utterly believable worldbuilding, even if the future represented here is

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