Deemed by biographer Robert Lomas as “the man who invented the 20th century,” Nikola Tesla was one of the world’s most revolutionary and famed electrical engineers. He is a captivating if not puzzling figure, whose interests ranged from electromagnetism to Vedic philosophy to pigeons. Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else brilliantly resurrects Tesla’s stay at the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived out his last days. On New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa, a young chambermaid, first encounters a luminous Tesla during a blackout at the hotel. She strikes up a friendship with the extraordinary inventor through their shared love of pigeons and begins to uncover his past. All the while, her romance with Arthur—a mechanic possibly from the future—buds, and her father’s impending departure in a time machine approaches. With The Invention of Everything Else Hunt celebrates the spirit of invention, and of life itself.
-Lisa Kunik

Lisa Kunik: The opening pages of The Invention of Everything Else transport the reader to an early twentieth century New York painted through a magical realist lens in which Nikola Tesla converses with pigeons. Likewise, your first novel The Seas embodies a magical spirit, that of the sea and mermaids. Has the realm of the magical always inspired your writing?

Samantha Hunt: I never think of it as magic or magical realism but I have always had an interest in mystery and those writers who, rather than solve mysteries, point out even larger ones — people like Haruki Murakami and Kelly Link. The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena — that we all agree happen — are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

(more…)

The Sabotage Café tells the story of Cheryl, a bored suburbanite playing with anarchy for the first time. After running away from home in the novel’s opening scene, Cheryl finds herself down and out in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown, at home– for the first time, perhaps– holed up among the lost youth of her generation in the abandoned building known as the The Sabotage Café.

But Cheryl’s mother, Julia, cannot seem to let her daughter go, especially since she knows what life in Dinkytown is like– having herself gone to live there some twenty years earlier, back when the now dilapidated The Sabotage Café was Minneapolis punk-rock mecca. Cheryl’s attempt to escape her mother, and her mother’s life, join them together, and it seems that the farther Cheryl runs, the closer she gets.
-Adam Goldwyn

Adam Goldwyn: How did you come up with the name The Sabotage Café? Is there an intentional irony in this choice? How does the theme of sabotage play itself out in the novel, if at all? And also, what about “café,” since this word, reeking as it does of bourgeois respectability and Starbucks’ capitalism, is the very thing Cheryl and her friends are trying to avoid?

Joshua Furst: The title rose from a number of sources: When I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 90s, there was a bookstore on St. Marks called Sabotage Books where the gutter punks who were the initial inspiration for the book seemed to spend a lot of time hanging out. Then, also, there’s a legendary collectively-owned Anarcho-leaning joint in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis called the Hard Times Café. The title of the book nods to both these establishments. Hopefully, it does more than this. Of course, much of the action of the book transpires in a place actually called The Sabotage Café. But I think more interestingly, the central story being told revolves around Julia, and the ways her mind is at war with itself. She, in her respectable, bourgeois suburb is a kind of Sabotage Café of one.
(more…)

A sweet note to relay that our virtual book clubs are on hold until further notice. We will not be taking applicants for book clubs and all previously scheduled book clubs have been cancelled. Please note that this does not affect our weekly show or WR Classics. Keep checking back for updates. Thanks!

Du Maurier’s work lends itself to film.  Atmospheric, plot driven, psychological… 

For those of you who have read REBECCA, you’ll notice that in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 production Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter isn’t a murderer at all…what’s up with that?  Most people think it is because Hitchcock felt it was too much of a challenge to make a murderer seem sympathetic.  From what I’ve researched, however, it seems it was actually a little more political.  Although the producer wanted to be faithful to the novel, the censors demanded that Maxim de Winter could not kill his wife without paying the penalty. Suicide was also frowned upon. After a hard-fought but futile battle, Selznick had to settle for Rebecca being accidentally killed when she falls while attacking Max.

But on to Hitchcock and Du Maurier.  Despite the success of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and later, The Birds, Du Maurier did not like Hitchcock’s adaptations of her work.  Probably because Hitchcock was notorious for having his own agenda.  Du Maurier felt he changed her works a little too liberally, shaping them into his own vision.  I love Hitchcock as much as I love Du Maurier.  I think it is a good idea to take a look at both versions of the work and compare.  I do think that one especially interesting addition in the film version of Rebecca is the scene in which Maxim describes Rebecca’s death.  Hitchcock films an invisible Rebecca during the entire description to eerie effect.  With this gesture, Hitchcock embues the film with Rebecca — she looms throughout just as she does in the book.I’ll refrain from discussing the discrepancies between Hitchcock’s The Birds (one of my favorite films) and Du Maurier’s short story.  (Du Maurier especially hated this Hitchcock adaption.)  Indeed, they are quite different.  I recommend both though as each have their own merits.

In a comment, a reader mentioned DON’T LOOK NOW.  This is a terrific Du Maurier short story collection (which includes “The Birds”).  Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation stars Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, a pair of creepy elderly sisters and something even more sinister at the very end.  The setting is Venice.  The couple is on vacation, in an attempt to get over the death of their young daughter.  The short story and film are often classified as “horror” but both go somewhere deeper than conventional horror.  I promise you won’t forget the story or the film. 

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me”.

I feel like it is almost cliche to begin my post with Daphne Du Maurier’s opening lines to REBECCA, one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Here, Du Maurier immediately establishes the voice, locale, and dream-like atmosphere of her story. We are sucked into another world and, like her nameless narrator, forever haunted by the imposing structure of Manderley and the larger than life ghost of her husband’s dead wife.

And yet, despite her timeless ability to compel readers, Du Maurier often gets a bad rap. Until recently, she was dismissed as an escapist romance novelist. The prevailing thought for some time was that her work was “middle-brow.” Others considered it trash. Why? Let me try to put it into context. The books REBECCA most closely resemble are JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Emily Bronte), both published ninety-one years before Du Maurier’s bestseller. Meanwhile, James Joyce’s experimental FINNEGAN’S WAKE was published in 1939 (just a year after REBECCA) and Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, MRS. DALLOWAY was published thirteen years before REBECCA. So, Du Maurier was writing traditional historical romances and gothic thrillers at a time when her best known contemporaries were more concerned with experimenting with form. She, in fact, wrote — what we might now call — commercial women’s fiction.

In recent years, critics have revised their takes on Du Maurier and her status has been elevated. They have focused on the Freudian and Jungian subtexts of her books, news of her potential bi-sexuality, and the undeniably powerful psychological realism in her works. Her work is now commonly accepted as literature.

Yes, it might be true that there is a “trashy” element to REBECCA, if trashy is equivalent to page-turning and accessible (although that might not be it, exactly, either) but it seems far too easy to dismiss the novel or the author. First of all, as in REBECCA, Du Maurier’s endings are never quite happy. When one reads REBECCA, they enter a dark and queasy place full of twists and turns and never feel quite at rest even at the book’s close. (Not exactly a place you would want to escape to.) Second, I think Du Maurier touches on something profound in all of her novels and short stories: whether it is the loneliness at the heart of her book and their heroines, the complicated relationship between the narrator and Rebecca, or the way in which a house (Manderley) becomes a complex character in its own right.

-Jennifer Bassett

For anyone frustrated with the soul-killing monotony of a nine-to-five job, this quirky collection helps beat the office blues, inspire creativity in seemingly dead-end situations, and preserve a bit of integrity in a conformist corporate culture. Among other things, you will learn how to:

- Survive long, boring meetings
- Plot out a “sick day” calendar to maximize time off
- Write your novel on company time
- Create the most pro-worker cubicle to instill a false sense of your total commitment
- Anonymously send your boss a Happy Secretary’s Day bouquet

Overall, the book aims to turn the daily grind on its head, so that instead of feeling overwhelmed and disgruntled, you will foster fun and creative ways to make the workplace work for you.

About the Author: Jeffrey Yamaguchi threw himself a retirement party at the age of 26. No, he had not won the lottery or benefited from a stock options windfall. It was just wishful thinking, which continues on to this day. More of his schemes can be found at workingfortheman.com and 52projects.com. His new book, Working For The Man: Inspiring and Subversive Projects for Residents of Cubicle Land, has just been published by Penguin.

The author will be joining the show at 6:00pm. Want to score a free copy of Working for the Man? Leave a comment for the author here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!

Erin Hennicke is back to chat about books and books to film! Join us at 6:40 as we chat all things books & film! Erin Hennicke started her career in the Subsidiary Rights Department of Viking Penguin before segueing into the film industry as a story editor at Barbra Streisand’s production company, Barwood Films, where she oversaw development and production. In 2000, Erin joined Franklin & Siegal & Associates, the largest literary scouting agency in New York, where for the past seven years she has scouted books & material for Universal Studios, among others, a job that allows her to have a foot in both the film and publishing industries.