Free online fiction from The New Yorker Also available as a podcast Audiobook. (Search for David Gilbert Reads Samantha Hunt). "t’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks along the highway from the bus depot up to her family’s house. She avoids the roadway by walking just outside the guardrail in the long, dry grass that’s been matted down by road salt and rain, strewn with trash and the surprisingly bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice imagines that every car and truck passing holds someone she once knew in high school. Inside their cars they are shaking their heads and asking, “Is that Beatrice? What the hell is she doing with a bloated raccoon carcass?”"
Author
Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books—good and bad ones—that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory. Samantha Hunt received a National Book Foundation award for authors under 35, for her novel, The Seas. The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She won the Bard Fiction Prize for 2010.
