Allen Kurzweil Ordine dei libri (cronologico)

Employing scientific methods learned in Mr. Sparks's class, fifth-grader Leon competes in a potato chip tasting contest and takes revenge against Lumpkin the bully.

This book is about a hotel full of animals. And an evil ice maker. And glass eyeballs -- oh, and really old panty hose and Possibly Fake Hair. But mostly, it's about Leon Zeisel and his epic quest to survive fourth grade, despite his teacher, Miss Hagmeyer, and his archenemy, Lumpkin the Pumpkin, a human tank with a deadly dodgeball throw. Luckily, Leon has friends who will stand by him even if his magical plans for rescue and revenge involve ... SPIT!

Narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian with arcane interests, this novel takes readers through a card catalog of desperation, delight, intrigue, and theft. It’s a suspenseful tale that unfolds with clock-maker precision and storytelling surprises. The narrative begins with Alexander facing job insecurity and a troubled marriage. Enter the uniquely named Henry James Jesson III, a bibliophile who hires Alexander for after-hours research. The task involves reconstructing an incomplete cabinet of wonders that chronicles the life of a mysterious eighteenth-century inventor. As the investigation intensifies, Alexander uncovers numerous secrets hidden within Jesson’s elegant Manhattan townhouse. Armed with a notebook, he dives deep into the search, only to find that the void in the cabinet mirrors an emptiness in his own heart. This delicious tale features quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous thefts, presenting a grand and complicated “timepiece” told with a devilish sense of fun. The colophon notes a tiny gear, a freehand rendering of an escapement wheel from Breguet’s masterpiece pocket watch, which remains lost since its theft from a Jerusalem museum in 1983.

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 watch making 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.