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, Ken Krimstein’s new book 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.
Krimstein will be in conversation about the book with translator and writer Ross Benjamin.
Ken Krimstein is a cartoonist, author, and educator whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune. His book, Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came up with the Universe was published by Bloomsbury in 2024. His 2021 book, When I Grow Up – The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers has been named an NPR Best Book of the Year, Washington Post Best Book of the Year and Top Ten Graphic Novel of 2021, and a Chicago Tribune Fall “Best Read.” His 2018 book The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt won the Bernard J. Bromel Award for Biography and Memoir and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Clarkson-Potter published his collection of cartoons Kvetch as Kvetch Can — Jewish Cartoons in 2011. His humor writing has been in The New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and humor websites, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. He is currently a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin where he is working on his next book.
Ross Benjamin’s translations include Franz Kafka’s Diaries (Schocken, 2023), Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Pantheon, 2020) and You Should Have Left (Pantheon, 2017), Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo (Liveright, 2014), Joseph Roth’s Job (Archipelago Books, 2010), Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew (Melville House, 2008), and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago, 2008).
His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize. He received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov (Verso Books, 2009), a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate Clemens J. Setz’s The Frequencies, and a commendation from the judges of the 2012 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011).
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and other publications. He is coeditor of the Substack FRANZ, where he regularly posts new translations of Kafka’s complete letters in chronological order. He was a 2003–2004 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and is a graduate of Vassar College.