Adam Wilson is the author of three books: the novels
Sensation Machines (2020) and
Flatescreen (2012), and the collection of short stories
What's Important is Feeling (2014).
At Electric Lit he tagged seven "books that push us out of complacency and force us to stare at our ugliest selves," including:
Slumberland by Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty is best known for his Booker Prize-winning 2015 novel, The Sellout, and his cultishly admired 1996 debut, The Whiteboy Shuffle. Both are great, but so are 
Beatty’s other novels, Tuff and Slumberland. I’m especially fond of the latter. Set in Berlin just after the fall of the Wall, Slumberland chronicles the adventures of a “jukebox sommelier” in search of a lost avant-garde jazz musician. The novel opens with what is certainly the funniest riff on tanning salons ever put to print, and keeps moving with the speed and precision of a NASCAR racer navigating the Autobahn. Beatty’s prose is pyrotechnic, and the joke-to-page ratio is unprecedented, but Slumberland also offers profound insights on expat culture and the end of The Cold War.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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