Description

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“Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet-and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!” -Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer

From the award-winning New Yorker cartoonist, a graphic narrative revealing the pivotal year in Prague when Einstein became “Einstein,” Franz Kafka became “Kafka,” and the world changed forever.

During the year that Prague was home to both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the trajectory of the two men's lives wove together in uncanny ways-as did their shared desire to tackle the world's biggest questions in Europe's strangest city. In stunning words and pictures, Einstein in Kafkaland reveals the untold story of how their worlds wove together in a cosmic battle for new kinds of truth.

For Einstein, his lost year in Prague became a critical bridge set him on the path to what many consider the greatest scientific discovery of all time, his General Theory of Relativity. And for Kafka, this charmed year was a bridge to writing his first masterpiece, The Judgment. Based on diaries, lectures, letters, and papers from this period amid a planet electrifying itself into modernity, Einstein in Kafkaland brings to life the emergence of a new world where art and science come together in ways we still grapple with today.

About the Author

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Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and has been published in eight countries and in six languages. He is also the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can and, most recently, When I Grow Up, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the Washington Post. A recipient of a Yaddo residency, he lives and writes and draws in Evanston, Illinois.

Praise For…

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“Einstein in Kafkaland is crisply written, witty, and with art that evokes places in time and feelings in the way all great graphic stories should. Along with some of Einstein's important physics, you may learn just what Kafka was driving at. One man manages to convince his readers the universe is impossible to understand; it's mysterious, even hostile. The other discovers the universe is knowable, if we embrace a future determined by gravity. If that seems weird and Kafka-esque, read on.” —Bill Nye

“Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet-and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer

“Mesmerizing... hauntingly complex and endlessly vital.” —NPR, 100 Notable Reads of 2021, on WHEN I GROW UP

“[A] gifted storyteller... It is an epic undertaking, told in tones both evocative and haunting” —The Washington Post on WHEN I GROW UP

“Gorgeous . . . it's packed with wit . . . it's a fun and, especially in a final illustration that encapsulates Arendt's hopes for a better world, inspiring work.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune on THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT

“The astounding life of a 20th-century original as told by a skillful cartoonist frolicking in long form . . . A compelling performance with great pacing that makes abstruse political theory both intelligible and memorable.” —Kirkus, starred review, on THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT

“When I Grow Up is too thoughtful to lean on gathering shadows or premonitions. Instead, Krimstein focuses on the kids and their joys … but what comes across is not threat or fear so much as promise and possibilities … each story drawn with a wistful impermanence that recalls Jules Feiffer.” —The Chicago Tribune on WHEN I GROW UP

“Read­ers will leave this book with a sense of grat­i­tude for Krimstein's inno­v­a­tive vision of a time and place, res­cued from oblivion.” —Emily Schneider, Jewish Book Council, on WHEN I GROW UP

“Deeply affecting yet often joyful ... Krimstein's loose-lined drawings shift between sobriety and humor, while footnotes provide context … By depicting the personalities of youth lost-with easy beauty and a lack of preciosity-rather than how they died, Krimstein conveys the depth of human and cultural loss that much more profoundly.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review, on WHEN I GROW UP

“It's remarkable how lively Krimstein makes thought look in the book . . . how fluidly he conveys freewheeling conversations, how nimbly he switches gears.” —The Chicago Reader on WHEN I GROW UP