Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe

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.

“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

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

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, published in six languages and a winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award and a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and Chautauqua Prize. 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 in Evanston, Illinois.