He is also the co-inventor, with his son Max, of Potato Chip Science, an eco-friendly experiment kit for grade schoolers.

[2][3] Kurzweil has written two award-winning children's books: Leon and the Spitting Image (2003), and Leon and the Champion Chip (2005), and, in 2015, published Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully, an Edgar Award winning "investigative memoir.

Kurzweil has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers,[6] and the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

A Case of Curiosities, a finalist for the Prix Médicis and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, received the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1993.

[7] His memoir, Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully, originally published as a personal history in the New Yorker,[8] in 2016 received the Edgar Award in the category of "Best Fact Crime.