Houghton Mifflin
Price: $24.00
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SAMANTHA HUNT reads from The Invention of Everything Else
Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome SAMANTHA HUNT to read from her new historical novel The Invention of Everything Else. In her new work of fiction, Hunt (The Seas) imagines the last days of Nikola Tesla—Serbian-American inventor, physicist, and electro-mechanical engineer—in the Hotel New Yorker in 1943. Hunt luminously resurrects one of the greatest scientists of all time while transporting readers to an early-twentieth-century New York City thrumming with energy . From the moment Louisa, a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker, first catches sight of Nikola Tesla, the hotel's most famous guest, on New Year's Day, 1943, she 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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Samantha Hunt has spent four years researching Nikola Tesla, in the course of which she has appeared in several Tesla-related documentaries, visited Tesla fanatics across the country, and explored the five subterranean floors of the still-standing Hotel New Yorker. She is the author of the acclaimed first novel The Seas, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeneys and on This American Life. She recently received the first-ever "'5 under 35"' award from the National Book Foundation.
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