Coming To A Bookstore Near You: The Infernal Machine

New reviews and bookstore events for my latest book, to be published next Tuesday.

We’re just one week away from the publication date for The Infernal Machine, and so I wanted to send a quick note to the Adjacent Possible community to let you know about a few events we have lined up to support the launch. Here’s the calendar: 

May 14, 6pm: Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA 

May 15, 7pm: Books Inc, Palo Alto, CA

May 16, 7pm: Third Place Books, Seattle

May 22, 7pm: Powerhouse Area, Brooklyn

Note that the Brooklyn event is ticketed, though you get a copy of the book—signed and dedicated by me, if you so choose—with the price of admission. If you missed some of my earlier posts about The Infernal Machine, you can catch up here. Since I last wrote to you about the book, we’ve received a few more glowing early reviews, including this starred review from Publisher’s Weekly:

Bomb-hurling anarchists square off against cops and their newfangled scientific sleuthing in this action-packed history. Bestseller Johnson (Enemy of All Mankind) surveys the American anarchist movement of the 1880s through the 1920s, which launched dozens of terrorist attacks. At the center of the narrative are Russian-Jewish immigrant radicals Alexander Berkman, who shot and stabbed steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in a failed 1892 assassination attempt, and Emma Goldman, Berkman’s sometime lover. Full of rousing speeches, feverish conspiracies, and tearful leave-takings, their soap opera–like story gives the book a romantic sheen. Johnson also explores innovations wrought by dynamite, which enabled New York to build subways and skyscrapers, but also furnished anarchists—and organized criminals—with cheap and easily hidden bombs. The book’s third strand recounts how the NYPD battled bombers with new techniques, including fingerprint identification, a bomb squad, and undercover investigations, one of which foiled a plot to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Johnson’s entertaining true crime picaresque coalesces around the resonant irony of anarchists who dreamed of a stateless society getting crushed by an ever more powerful surveillance state, embodied by the investigative filing system that future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover deployed to build a successful case to deport Berkman and Goldman in 1919. The result is a captivating saga of vehement political passions quelled by cold technocracy.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways you can support an author is by pre-ordering their book. (This page has links to many major booksellers, but you can always pre-order from your favorite indie bookstore as well.) But the second best way you can support an author is by showing up for a bookstore event! Over the course of my career, I’ve had some fantastic events with packed houses, and then I’ve had some events that were… not so packed. On the tour for my first book, Interface Culture, I had probably the most awkward situation possible, where exactly one person showed up. A few years later, I did a slightly depressing talk in a random bookstore in a suburban mall that was attended only by a handful of people, but a few minutes into my talk, another person joined, lifting my spirits briefly—until it turned out that he was a shoplifter trying to evade the mall cops, who swiftly descended on him and dragged him out of the bookstore. So it goes. 

If you’re planning on coming to one of these events—and I realize only a small portion of you live in those three regions—please drop me a note responding to this email (or send me a note at sbeej68@gmail.com) to let me know that you’re coming. It would be a treat to have a little in-person time with some of you, so perhaps we can organize an Adjacent Possible meetup before the events. We should also try to organize some kind of virtual book event as well for those of you who are not in Brooklyn, Seattle, or the Bay Area. I’ll be sure to mention in subsequent newsletters if that comes together. 

Hope to see some of you next week!