The Inventors - by Peter Selgin (Paperback)

About the Book

""This book is mainly about two men who were very important to me. "The first was there at my conception; the second came along 13 years later. Both men shaped my personality. "The first man was my father, Paul Selgin, who, it so happens, was an inventor. The second was my eighth grade English teacher." Both Selgin's father and the man he calls "the teacher" led remarkable lives. Among other things, Paul Selgin invented the first dollar bill-changing-machine and helped design the so-called proximity fuse, which hastened the end of World War II. As for the teacher, he became a forceful advocate for human rights and diversity, championing the cause of indigenous peoples and refuges from Southeast Asia, while insisting that they not forget their history - ironically, since the teacher did everything he could to obliterate his own. As Selgin discovers only after their deaths, for very different reasons both men felt compelled to reinvent themselves. The Inventors is the story of how these two charismatic men shaped the author's life. It's also the story of a relationship between a boy and his teacher, a relationship that was equal parts inspiring and destructive. "--

Book Synopsis

"A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel." --Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

Fall, 1970. At the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford in Frye boots, with long hair, and a passion for his students that was intense and unorthodox. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin with a burning need to feel unique.

The teacher supplied that need. They spent hours in the teacher's cottage, discussing books, playing chess, drinking tea, and wrestling. They were inseparable, until the teacher "resigned." Over the next decade they met occasionally and corresponded constantly, their last meeting a disaster. Only after he died did Peter learn that the teacher had completely fabricated his past.

As for Peter's father, the British-accented genius inventor, he turned out to be the son of prominent Italian Jews. Paul Selgin and the teacher were both "self-inventors," enigmatic men whose lies and denials betrayed the boy who idolized them.

The Inventors is the story of how these men shaped the author"s journey to manhood, a story of promises fulfilled and broken as he uncovers the truth about both men, and about himself.

For like them--like all of us--Peter Selgin, too, is his own inventor.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

PETER SELGIN is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction, a novel, two books on fiction writing, and several children's books. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, his memoir-in-essays, was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize. His novel, The Water Master, won the Wisdom/Faulkner Society Prize for Best Novel. His essays have won many awards and honors, including six citations and two selections for the Best American anthologies, in which the title essay of his collection appears.

Selgin's drama, A God in the House, based on Dr. Kevorkian and his suicide machine, was staged at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwright's Conference in 1991. Other plays of his have won the Charlotte Repertory New Play Festival Competition, the Mill Mountain New Plays Competition, and the Stage 3 Theater Festival of New Plays. His paintings have been featured in The New Yorker, Gourmet, Outside, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, and exhibited nationally.

Selgin is the prose editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food, and nonfiction editor and art director of Arts & Letters. He is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia College and an associate faculty member of Antioch University's Creative Writing MFA program in Los Angeles.