The creator of Yale University's popular "Genius Course" examines how fourteen key habits of genius, from curiosity and creative maladjustment to rebelliousness and obsession, have been effectively demonstrated by history's most influential and change-promoting intellectuals Pablo Picasso couldn't pass a 4th grade math test. Steve Jobs left high school with a 2.65 GPA. Yet they are considered geniuses, and their cultural contributions have helped...

How did Richard Ford's cat influence his work as a novelist? How is Chuck Close's portraiture driven by his inability to remember faces? What pivotal moment helped Rosanne Cash understand the healing power of the stage? Creativity is an elusive subject. We enjoy its fruits--movies, novels, paintings, songs--but rarely are we privy to what happens in the creative process. In Spark, journalist Julie Burstein traces the roots of some of the twenty-first...

When a group of crazy college geniuses put their heads together, their plan culminates in an incredible scheme that outsmarts the military and convinces the professor that it doesn't pay to fool with real genius.

"A sweeping novel set in Singapore during the years leading up to its independence from British colonial powers, about one young boy from a rural fishing family and the love story that will shape his life and complicate the fate of his larger community"-- Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing,...

"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills...

"Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius - but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." So begins Katie Spalding's spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how...

"School's out, and Wiki and Leen Ellison are facing a new challenge... their first summer apart! Genius inventor Leen has been accepted to Petey Thunkle's world-famous summer training program for STEM prodigies with their eyes on the stars. Meanwhile, Wiki is looking forward to her first summer on her own, running the family corn stand and outclassing Otto and Sheed Alston. But the night before Leen's departure, the twins find out that Wiki has also...

A certain pen, a certain book, and a certain person can craft entirely new worlds through a branch of science called scriptology. Elsa comes from one such world that was written into creation by her mother a noted scriptologist.

In an alternate 19th-century Italy, Elsa has an incredible gift: she can craft new worlds with precise lines of script written in books. But political extremists have stolen the most dangerous book ever scribed--one that can rewrite the Earth itself. Now Elsa must track down the friend who betrayed her and recover the book before its destructive power is unleashed. Can she handle the secrets she'll uncover along the way--including the ones hiding...