SAMANTHA HUNT’s The Invention of Everything Else was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. After her first novel, The Seas, she was selected for the inaugural 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation program. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s.
What are you reading? What's on your nightstand?
I'm currently reading two books, soon to be published: Paul LaFarge's The Night Ocean and Melanie Finn's The Gloaming. My book group just finished reading I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and on my nightstand I have Lydia Millet's Sweet Lamb of Heaven and Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird on deck.
Where do you go to get inspired?
I grew up in a crazy house, the youngest of six children. Our house was built before the Revolutionary War. Our neighbor, an older gentleman, grew up in my home and converted the hay barn into his house when he got married. Between his house and memory, and the wild detritus my artist mom has collected over the years, I find it very inspiring to just go home.
What's something that surprised you recently (in a good way)?
Two of my daughters learned to read. I also found an ancient deck of cards in a desk drawer with naked lady pictures on them!
Where do you write?
I write in my car, parked down at the river. I have to do this to escape the siren song of the internet.
What/who makes you laugh? Why?
Maria Bamford makes me laugh. Her strange way of seeing the world makes me hopeful.
Favorite fictional character ever?
The Artful Dodger is a good one.
What do you want readers to know about you and your books?
I don't believe in ghosts, except for when I do.
What are you working on?
Finishing a collection of short stories, working on a bit of non-fiction that examines ways we get haunted, and, of course, a new novel.
"Samantha Hunt’s third novel, MR. SPLITFOOT, will haunt me...I’ve dog-eared so many pages in honor of vivid prose that my advance reader’s copy of “Mr. Splitfoot” curls up with fattened corners. Hunt renders as ornate and magical the tired landscape of Troy and upstate New York — and I say this as a native of that area, with high regard for its quiddities. Hypnotic and glowing, “Mr. Splitfoot” insists on its own ghostly presence. Memory, either of dead people or of books read once upon a time, obeys only the rules it chooses."
—Gregory Maguire, New York Times Book Review
"Ethereal...The book deftly straddles the slippery line between fantasy and reality in a story that’s both gripping and wonderfully mystifying...interconnected chapters builds suspense while keeping readers guessing about what crazy turn might happen next. Hints of what’s in store for readers include a cult of Etherists, a noseless man, a pile of lost money, and a scar-like pattern of meteorite landings. This spellbinder is storytelling at its best."
—Publishers Weekly, ***Starred Review***
"A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion."
—Kirkus Reviews, ***Starred Review***
"Hunt (The Seas) delivers a breathtaking novel that is both difficult to classify and impossible to ignore."
—Library Journal
"In this quirky novel, Hunt imagines the last days of the eccentric scientist, Nikola Tesla, the inventor of AC electricity and wireless communication..Oddly charming and pleasantly peculiar, Hunt's novel offers a unique perspective on hope and imagining life's possibilities."
—Booklist
"A cross between Rosamunde Pilcher's Coming Home and R.A. Dick's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, this is a beautifully unconventional story."
—Library Journal
The Invention of Everything Else by
New York City thrums with energy, wonder, and possibility in this magical novel about the life of Nikola Tesla. It is 1943, and the renowned inventor Nikola Tesla occupies a forbidden room on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, stealing electricity. Louisa, a young maid at the hotel determined to befriend him, wins his attention through a shared love of pigeons; with her we hear his tragic and tremendous life story unfold. Meanwhile, Louisa discovers that her father—and her handsome, enigmatic love interest, Arthur Vaughan—are on an unlikely mission to travel back in time and find his beloved late wife. A masterful hybrid of history, biography, and science fiction,The Invention of Everything Else is an absorbing story about love and death and a wonderfully imagined homage to one of history's most visionary scientists.
Mr. Splitfoot by
A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning. Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who -- or what -- has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road? In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous books, Samantha Hunt continues to be "dazzling" (Vanity Fair) and to deliver fiction that is "daring and delicious" (Chicago Tribune).
The Seas by
A strange young woman who thinks shes a mermaid falls in love with an ex-soldier who is haunted by the sea.
