Published in 2004
193 pages
Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn’t haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory.
She received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
What is this book about?
The narrator of The Seas lives in a tiny, remote, alcoholic, cruel seaside town. An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is “creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature.”
