A Memoir: The Inventors

Praise For This Book

Finalist for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize
Finalist for the Graywolf Press Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction

"The twin dynamic of father/teacher is used here so masterfully, it’s as if Selgin has created a new kind of memoir—a page-turner of the first order. I couldn’t put this memoir down. I highly recommend The Inventors." —Robert Morgan Fisher, The Rumpus

"What is refreshing about literary memoirs like Peter Selgin’s is how they transform the reader through writing and self-invention. The Inventors is a sensitive examination of how friends and family are responsible for inventing a person." —Jacob Singer, Fiction Advocate

"[The Inventors] is a book destined to become a modern classic. A remarkable model of the art of the memoir, this book will satisfy all readers. Highly recommended." —Library Journal

"A reflective investigation of the self, memory, and invention." —Kirkus Reviews

"Peter Selgin is a born writer, capable of taking any subject and exploring it from a new angle, with wit, grace, and erudition." —Oliver Sacks

"Only a writer as gifted and insightful as Peter Selgin could have produced this deeply compelling story of two brilliant but extraordinarily deceitful men and the complicated relationships he shared with them. A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel." —Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

"This story is about what we make and how we make it. Selves, lives, love stories, life stories, death stories. It is also the story of how creation and destruction are always the other side of each other. And like the lyric language so gorgeously invented in this book that it nearly killed me, its meanings are endlessly in us. Writers live within language, and so in some ways, you might say we are at the epicenter." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and The Small Backs of Children

"The Inventors is a philosophical memoir that grapples with some of the questions regarding how we invent ourselves and how we in turn are invented by others, particularly our mentors. Thanks to Selgin’s autobiographical candor and the vivid details of his telling, these puzzles of identity seem as fresh, engaging, and befuddling as they were when they first bubbled to the surface of our thinking. A smart, tender, compelling book." —Billy Collins, author of Aimless Love

"Peter Selgin’s intricately woven memoir, The Inventors, offers a unique, engaging, and occasionally startling examination of how childhood influences bend and shape us into being. Selgin’s candor and intimacy bring to vivid life the Zen koan of how we become the people we become and how we somehow never really know who we are." —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

"Peter Selgin’s The Inventors is brilliant, brave and compelling and inventive all at once. This is an intimately intimate rendering not just of Selgin's coming of age, but indeed his rebirth into a new life of cognitive thought, of making sense of a perplexing world, of inventing out of blood and abstract ideas and hidden histories who, exactly, he is. This is an intelligent and moving book, a gorgeous book, an important book." —Bret Lott, author of Dead Low Tide

"In The Inventors, Peter Selgin unrolls the blueprint of his life, investigating how two men—his father and a charismatic middle school teacher—helped create the man he is today. Lyrical, honest and (dare I say?) inventive, The Inventors is a deeply compelling meditation on how we make and remake ourselves throughout our lives—choice by choice, action by action, word by glorious, slippery word." —Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds