A wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lives out his last days.
From the moment she first catches sight of the Hotel New Yorkers most famous resident on New Years Day 1943, Louisa -- obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the guests -- is determined to befriend this strange man. As Louisa discovers their shared affinity for pigeons, she also begins to piece together Teslas extraordinary story of life as an immigrant, a genius, and a halfhearted capitalist. Meanwhile, Louisafaced with her fathers imminent departure in a time machine to reunite with his late wife, and pleasantly unsettled by the arrival in her life of a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur -- begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship of love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.
"Hunt (The Seas) delivers a breathtaking novel that is both difficult to classify and impossible to ignore ..... Peppered with literary quotations, historical figures, and subtle eroticism, this book will please readers who enjoy experimentation and uncertainty in both their fiction choices and their worldview." - Library Journal.
"Each individual plot thread has potential, but the cumulative effect is dulled by an unwieldy structure." - Publishers Weekly.
"A bold but failed attempt to combine magic realism and intellectual fiction." - Kirkus Reviews.
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Samantha Hunt's novel about Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else, was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Her first novel, The Seas, won the National Book Foundation's Five Under Thirty-Five prize. Hunt's work has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, the New York Times, Tin House, A Public Space, Cabinet, Blind Spot, the London Times and in a number of other fine publications. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She has performed with Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante at All Tomorrow's Parties, at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum and REDCAT, with the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) at PS122, in the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series, at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival, and as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Her ...

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