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      Praise for Peter Selgin

       The Inventors

       • Finalist: Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize

       • Finalist: Graywolf Press Prize for Nonfiction

       • Finalist: AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction

      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

      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 by 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 writes brilliantly about our mindfulness and forgetting – the necessary inventions and reinventions that help us live. The lies of his father and his eighth-grade teacher inevitably enter into this intricate portrait of inner and outer selves. As he inhabits their action, talk, and thought, he teaches and fathers himself. In language most rare for its transparency, Mr. Selgin reminds his readers of the difference between artifice and the genuine. In these remarkable pages, he has become one of the truest of our writers.

       CAROL FROST, author of Honeycomb

      Peter Selgin’s The Inventors is brilliant, brave, compelling, and inventive all at once. This is an intimately intimate rendering not just of Selgin’s coming-of-age, but indeed of 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

      Peter Selgin’s The Inventors is a remarkable study in remembering, in empathy, and most of all in reckoning.

       KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk

      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

      I have never read anything like The Inventors, Peter Selgin’s incomparable, brilliant, and achingly human memoir. With this deceptively simple story of the author’s relationships with two self-invented figures – his father and an influential teacher – and with his own younger self – Selgin has produced a deep-core sample of the human condition. Like William Blake, he finds a whole world in a few grains of sand. He has shown, in language remarkably beautiful and accessible, how we are invented, by the people who profess to love and care for us and by our complicit selves. I was profoundly moved reading this book, by its deep intelligence, its constantly sweet, knowing humor, and the recognition in it of myself and everyone I have ever loved.

       PETER NICHOLS, author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen

      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 lyrical 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

       Drowning Lessons

       • Winner, 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

       • Finalist: Iowa Short Fiction Award

       • Finalist: Jefferson Press Prize

       • Finalist: Ohio State University Press Prize

      Thank goodness for Peter Selgin, who shares with us the mysteries of the human heart in this electric, revealing collection.

       BENJAMIN PERCY, author of Refresh, Refresh

      A stellar collection deserving recognition.

       MELISSA PRITCHARD, author of Late Bloomer

      Drowning Lessons is a book that deserves serious attention from all lovers of American short fiction.

       JESS ROW, author of The Train to Lo Wu

      Drowning Lessons is an extraordinary book; Selgin’s writing creates a current that will carry readers farther than they would ever have expected and leave them on a new shore.

       HANNAH TINTI, author of Animal Crackers

       Life Goes to the Movies

       • Finalist: AWP Award Series for the Novel

       • Finalist: James Jones First Novel Fellowship

      An utterly absorbing novel. A wonderful read.

       MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The House on Fortune Street

      From beginning to end, I kept imagining the funnels of smoke that surely must have risen from his keyboard as he wrote this potent, superbly crafted, and wonderfully ambitious novel.

       DONALD RAY POLLOCK, author of Knockemstiff

      Wonderfully innovative and elegantly crafted, Life Goes to the Movies brims with exuberance and wit.

       FREDERICK REIKEN, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey

      [Life Goes to the Movies is] a riveting story, artfully constructed and told with wit, precision, and sensitivity.

       JOANNA SCOTT, author of Everybody Loves Somebody

       Confessions of a Left-Handed Man

       • Finalist, William Saroyan International Prize

      The quirky, intelligent memoir of an artist and fiction writer … An engaging, original modern-day picaresque.

       KIRKUS

      Tawdry as [his] first love affair with literature may have been, how glad we are that Peter Selgin was tempted into it – and fell head over heels. Without such an addictive beginning, that boy may never have grown up to become a writer of such great substance.

       NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS REVIEW

      Selgin deftly balances humor and tenderness throughout these life-affirming confessions.

       PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW

      Peter Selgin is a born writer, capable of taking any subject and exploring it from a new angle with wit, grace, and erudition. He has a keen eye for the telling detail and a voice that is deeply personal, appealing, and wholly original. Fans of Selgin’s fiction will know they are in for a treat, and those who are new to his work would do

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