The Seas - Softcover

Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, her debut novel, won a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. She is also the author of Mr. Splitfoot, Dark, Dark: Stories, and  The Invention of Everything Else. Hunt's writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Tin House, Cabinet, among others.

“One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years. This book will linger . . . in your head for a good long time.”
- Dave Eggers

“An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes . . . Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction.”
- The New Yorker

“Hunt's spare narrative is as mysterious and lyrical as a mermaid's song. The strands of her story are touched with magic, strange in the best possible way and very pleasurable to read.”
- Andrea Barrett

“The Seas is creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature.”
- Michelle Tea

“Urgently real and magically unreal . . . A breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean's merciless blue . . . [Hunt] sinks an anchor into the soul of its lost young protagonist.”
- The Village Voice

“The Seas reads as though . . . John Hawkes had sprouted Márquezian wings, Raymond Carver had lived to see Prozac proliferate. She has some of her tics, for sure--but they're palatable when tinged with the fabulous. . . . It's the book's emotional expressiveness . . . that ultimately breaks the mood's prescribed monotony and lofts it above its precursors.”
- The New York Observer

“To describe Samantha Hunt's entrancing first novel, The Seas, is to try to interpret a watery dream that pushes the boundaries between fiction and fantasy. . . . Hunt's nimbleness makes the idea of leaning toward mermaid fantasies enticing.”
- San Francisco Chronicle