Description
Book SynopsisShe's one of the stars of the shore this summer; one of the girls who doesn't care what she's drinking or what pill she's taking; who ties perfectly knotted cherry stems with her tongue; her family is rich and she's untouchable. Except her parents' marriage is in brutal collapse and her brother is violently lashing out, the community around her wracked with suspicion and guilt. As her identity unravels, she circles back to the night that a local girl drowned, and no one tried to save her. Daringly experimental, Machine is a kaleidoscopic interrogation of gender, class and privilege, an unforgettable rendering of youth spinning out of control.
Trade Review'Steinberg shifts backwards 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' -
New Yorker'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
'Her slim narrative of adolescent crisis is as propulsive as it is disorienting, subverting expectations at every turn' -
The Atlantic
