From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, a brilliant graphic narrative revealing the pivotal year in Prague when Einstein became "Einstein," Kafka became "Kafka," and everything 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. Tying the literary, scientific, and geographic centers of the world together for a single year, Einstein in Kafkaland tells an untold story of two of the modern era's defining figures, each brought to vivid life with stunning artwork in Krimstein's signature style, as they battle God for truth in a cosmic universe against the backdrop of Prague's intricacies and mysteries. For Einstein, his lost year spent in Prague became a critical bridge that connected months of failure and frustration, almost led him to "blow up" his greatest insights, and then led to the breakthrough thinking that set him on the path to what many have called "the greatest scientific discovery of all time." By researching his public statements, papers, lectures, and letters from this period, as well as the events of a planet electrifying itself into modernity, and aligning them with Kafka's very thorough diary, Krimstein animates their innovation through the city that harbored it. Einstein in Kafkaland shows how, by the time Einstein left Prague after many false starts and blind alleys, he had finally uncovered the way to his General Theory of Relativity, and how, after many similar false starts and blind alleys, Kafka produced his first masterpiece, The Judgment-both casting an irrevocable spell that would define modern reality, a world where art and science merge in inevitable, irreplaceable ways.
"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<