A Case of Curiosities

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.

Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places

Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.

The most exciting fiction debut in years, A Case of Curiosities has been praised from coast to coast. In France on the eve of Revolution, Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. His greatest device—a talking mechanical head—both crowns his career and leads to his bizarre execution.

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.

Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places

Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.

Chicago Tribune

Brilliantly playful . . clever indeed but also riotous, melodramatic and erotic, full of lore and lewdness and crackling with ideas and exhilarated imagination.

Allen Kurzweil was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta for A Case of Curiosities, his first novel. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Fullbright Fellowships, and a 1999 Fellow of the New York Public Library for Scholars and Writers. He has completed his second book, The Grand Complication. His fiction has been honored in the United States, France, Italy, and Ireland. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.