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Book Summary and Reviews of The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt

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  • Published:
  • Feb 2008, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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 Yorker’s most famous resident on New Year’s 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 Tesla’s extraordinary story of life as an immigrant, a genius, and a halfhearted capitalist. Meanwhile, Louisa—faced with her father’s 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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"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.

This information about The Invention of Everything Else was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Samantha Hunt Author Biography

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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