The Unwritten Book
An Investigation
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“One of our most interesting and bold writers . . . [offers] a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon . . . An intoxicating blend of humor and pathos.” —Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
“Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
From Samantha Hunt, the award-winning author of The Dark Dark, comes The Unwritten Book, her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending creation that explores the importance of books, the idea of haunting, and messages from beyond
I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead—those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am.
A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying.
Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages?
Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Hunt (The Dark Dark) scours literature for "alphabets and signs" of the dead in her stirring nonfiction debut. As she writes, "The dead leave clues, and life is a puzzle of trying to read and understand these mysterious hints before the game is over." Her investigation centers on an unfinished novel written by her late father, Walter, parts of which (as well as her annotations of it) are mixed in with her thoughts on what it means to be human. As she considers the novel (about a magazine editor confronted by a society of people who believe dreams can spill over into reality), Hunt reflects on her relationship with her father, including his alcoholism and the love of stories they shared. Like her father, Hunt thinks of books as waypoints: "In books we can find our ways back to the worlds we thought were lost, the world of childhood, the world of the dead." Hunt writes in touching detail and with heartfelt prose: "There is exquisite beauty and storytelling in the smallness. Reading life and death like a book." Both intimate and incisive, this genre-melding collection will make readers want to hold their loved ones close.
