The Dark Dark

Description

A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Vogue, The Huffington Post, The Chicago Review of Books, The National Post, Electric Literature, Kirkus 'Wields such a subtle and alien power . . . Wonderfully spooky' Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker 'A feminist manifesto threaded through imaginative fiction; it's the most evocative, impressive collection I've read this year' Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review Step into THE DARK DARK, where an award-winning, acclaimed novelist debuts her first collection of short stories and conjures entire universes in just a few pages - conjures, splits in half, mines for humor, destroys with absurdity, and regenerates. In prose that sparkles and haunts, Samantha Hunt playfully pushes the bounds of the expected and fills every corner with vibrant life, imagining numerous ways in which the weird might poke its way through the mundane. Each of these ten haunting, inventive tales brings us to the brink of creation, mortality and immortality, infidelity and transformation, technological innovation and historical revision, loneliness and communion, and every kind of love. Laced with lyricism, hope, Hunt's characteristic sly wit, and her unflinching gaze into the ordinary horrors of human existence, THE DARK DARK celebrates the mysteries and connections that swirl around us. It's never all the same, Hunt tells us. It changes a tiny bit every time. See for yourself.

Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York. The Seas is her debut novel - it won the National Book Foundation's award for writers under 35 and was voted one of the Top 27 Books of 2004 by the Voice Literary Supplement. She is also the author of The Invention of Everything Else which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2009. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Esquire, A Public Space, Cabinet, Tin House, Seed Magazine, New York Magazine, Blind Spot, Harper's Bazaar, and The Believer. Her work has been translated into seven languages. Samantha Hunt teaches writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Each of the stories in this collection harbors a surreal twist . . . Hunt lingers over such moments just long enough to suggest that the phantasmagorical can be found in any situation, no matter how banal - The New Yorker