Hunt, Samantha (J.)

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Hunt, Samantha (J.)

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Office—Pratt Institute, 144 W. 14th St., New York, NY 10011. E-mail—samanthajhunt@hotmail.com.

CAREER: Pratt Institute, New York, NY, writing and bookmaking teacher. Previous jobs include working at a raptor center and providing quality control at a factory. Artwork exhibited in New York Public Library.

WRITINGS:

The Seas (novel), MacAdam/Cage Publishing (San Francisco, CA), 2004.

Also author of a play, The Difference Engine, produced in 2003. Contributor to anthologies, including Trampoline, and to periodicals, including McSweeney's, Cabinet, Jubilat, Literary, Seed, Swerve, Colorado Review, Western Humanities Review, and Iowa Review. Fiction editor, Crowd magazine. Work has appeared on the National Public Radio program This American Life.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer and artist Samantha Hunt spent four years working on her first novel, The Seas. As the author told an interview for Powells.com, the work began as a collection of short stories, temporarily became a book of poems, and finally was transformed into a novel. The result is a book that combines realistic and fantastical elements in the story of a young woman's life in a remote, coastal village in the north. The unnamed protagonist survives by working menial jobs while she looks for her father's return, despite an eleven-year disappearance at sea. She is also haunted by hopes that an older man, a Gulf War veteran named Jude, will learn to return her affection. Her bleak prospects are relieved by alcohol and the conviction that she is a mermaid, something her father once told her. She believes that a rock on the beach is King Neptune, discovers unexplainable wet footprints in her attic, and tries to breath water into her lungs.

According to reviewers, The Seas shows the influences of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and the nineteenth-century German novel Undine. In the Literary Review, critic Mariya Gusev called the book "experimental writing that's both poetry and prose," while to Gusev the book's style serves as an "antidote to the linguistic sterility of the currently popular 'transparent' prose. Hunt's words have a smell, a sound, a weight, a texture." Some reviewers cautioned that the novel is not easy reading, Booklist contributor Michael Cart remarking that "obscure symbols and narrative ambiguity" may scare off some readers. A Kirkus Reviews writer called The Seas "almost successful," but felt that it is hampered by "Jude's war traumas, which have an inserted and prepackaged feel." Intrigued by the novel, Lisa Nussbaum commented in Library Journal that The Seas is "a beautifully unconventional story," while a Publishers Weekly critic noted that Hunt's "book devastates with its lonely, cold imagery." Lenora Todaro, writing in the Village Voice, praised the author's "kaleidoscopic" prose and "breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean's merciless blue."