Her first novel Machine: A Novel (Graywolf, 2019), revolving around a group of teenagers during a single summer at the shore, employs experimental language and structure to interrogate gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma.
[4] Susan Steinberg was the recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize for her short story "Cowboys.
[6] Publishers Weekly gave Machine a starred review, praising her "use of meter and line".
[7] About Machine, Ann Hulbert commended in The Atlantic Steinberg's "daring experiments with style and perspective".
[8] In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Schenker lauded the stylistic diversity of the chapters in Machine and the stylistic "tension between motion and stasis" in Spectacle.