Machine

A small book that tackles one of life's great mysteries: where does fate end and coincidence begin?   


Fifty-five million years ago, a sudden burst of lightning frightened a herd of small prehistoric horses. In the ensuing panic, one of the horses, a five-year-old mare no bigger than a fox terrier, fell into a lake and drowned. 

On June 23, 1975, in Austin, Texas, a drop of oil combusted in a car engine. This tiny explosion happened just as the Ford Pinto, driven by a one-armed hitchhiker named Jimmy, pulled into the parking lot of the Timber Creek Apartments, home to the young woman in the passenger's seat, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Clarissa Sanders. 

The lyrical and fantastical story of how these two seemingly unrelated events are actually connected, Machine is a daring mix of fact and fiction, of science and art.


Peter Adolphsen was born and raised in Denmark and has spent periods in Vienna, Austria, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. After incomplete studies in experimental theater, sculpture, literature, and Arabic, he graduated from the Danish Writersí School in 1995. He is the author of several short novels that have been translated into seven languages, and he received the three-year Work Grant from the Danish State in 2003.