The Invention of Everything Else - Tapa dura

"The author is rapturous, vividly in love with her subjects and her characters." - New York Observer "Hunt (The Seas) delivers a breathtaking novel that is both difficult to classify and impossible to ignore." "You hold in your hands an important, fun, educational, magic read." -- Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng "Full of vivid imagery, sounds, memories...this novel is a sweet story of just how normal it is to be different." "A New York City chambermaid sparks a friendship with oddball inventor Nikola Tesla in Samantha Hunt's dazzling novel." "An engaging portrait...and a poignant one of Tesla...There's much food for thought here and some very beautiful prose." "Hunt's fascination with language is unmistakable, resulting in beautiful, intimate observations . . . elegant, inspired." "A highwire performance by a soulful and wildly intelligent writer." -- Rene Steinke, author of the NBA-nominated Holy Skirts "Oddly charming and pleasantly peculiar, Hunt's novel offers a unique perspective on hope and imagining life's possibilities." "Marvelous...one wishes these scenes would never end...[it] takes its readers back to a kindler, gentler New York." - LA Weekly "[Hunt's] novel might be 2008's 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics'...soulful and scientific at the same time." - Velocity Weekly "[INVENTION is] a smart, colorful novel about aspiration and wish fulfillment in a world...engineers can't control." - The Believer "Hunt weaves history and imagination to create a seductively original world..." -- Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment "Hunt's history-steeped tale...reminds us that science necessitates creativity, which also, of course, is the essence of literature." "Hunt's magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world's most remarkable inventors...For a moment...everything seems possible." "In her vivid reimagining...Hunt pursues the links between science and creativity and storytelling and invention to their logical extreme." "Sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote...It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel." "An electrified, magnetized concoction that pleases, teases and dazzles...takeoff soaring with her, you will not be disappointed..." - The Oregonian "Hunt weaves the stranger-than-fiction facts...into an engaging novel...that crackles with the possibility and promise of scientific innovation." - Seed "Glorious...pages of prose: daring and delicious, perfectly calibrated, fresh but not raw, original but neither off-putting nor disconcertingly strange."

The story of the man who made the 20th Century and left nothing for himself... In The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt fictionalises the story of the Serbian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, a notoriously marginalised genius whose wild eccentricities, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and germ-phobia, have made him a counter-culture icon, but who faded into obscurity in his final years and died in poverty, suspected of anti-American sentiment. His carelessness about protecting his ideas through patents meant that he was eclipsed in reputation by Thomas Edison and Marconi, both of whom built fortunes by stealing Tesla's ideas. The Invention of Everything Else revolves around the twin poles of the inventor, and Louisa, a highly sensitive and imaginative young woman who encounters Tesla at the end of his life. It is also a novel about a father and a daughter, a love story, a New York story, and a literary mystery. In this meticulously researched and biographically accurate novel, Samantha Hunt weaves these elements into a narrative that is buoyant, engaging, and triumphant. The Invention of Everything Else is a beautiful, moving, and thrilling exploration of human loneliness and isolation and the opposing power of emotional and scientific imagination.