Artificial

Description

A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life

How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves?

In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.

Once, Fred’s life was saved by his art: an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht.

Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.

Amy’s deepening understanding of her family’s traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others. 

With Kurzweil’s signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.NPR, A Best Book of the Year
The New Yorker, A Best Book We Read This Week
A Booklist Editors’ Choice
Kirkus Reviews, A Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Chicago Tribune, A Top Pick for Fall

“This smart and spiritual graphic memoir not only chronicles the process that Amy and Ray go through to create a chatbot version of their forebear (‘Fred-bot’), but also asks big questions about how we memorialize the people we love and the relationship between technology and humanity.” —Chloe Veltman, NPR

“A breathtaking graphic memoir, Artificial is also a tender family story and a meditation on how art, technology, and memory keep people alive.” —Francie Lin, The Boston Globe

“Memory, both human and digital, plays a major part in the book. The illustrations draw you in; the words are pretty great, too.” —Erik Pedersen, The Orange County Register

“A loving investigation of the ineffable . . . Artificial brings the potentially absurd aspects of its story down to Earth with humor, spirit and a loose, Alison Bechdel-like style that brings light to the mortality-fraught subject.” —Chris Barsanti, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“A product of rapt observation . . . Kurzweil’s attentiveness is an act of devotion. Artificial is an art book about AI arriving at a time when the two fields are in intense conflict . . . Artificial invites readers to view AI as a potential bridge.” —Naomi Elias, KQED

“Can artificial intelligence preserve us from the loss of death? This is one of the many fascinating questions Amy Kurzweil raises in her second graphic memoir . . . Artificial is a big book full of big ideas about identity, heritage, and technology. In that sense, it couldn’t be more timely . . . Kurzweil is doing something really interesting here—and on a variety of levels at once.” —David Ulin, Alta

“An intimate story about how we preserve the bonds of family and the meaning of heritage across physical and temporal distances . . . With warmth and nuance, Kurzweil expresses a growing understanding of her family’s legacy and how it has influenced her life as an artist and her relationships. The result is a rich, searching account of how we become real and present to one another in a fragmented, often virtual world.” —Rachel Kolb, Stanford Magazine

“In her magnificently complex and dizzyingly astute new graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, Amy Kurzweil has attempted nothing less than to apprehend life’s deepest mysteries . . . Past and present are miraculously contemporaneous on a single page.” —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Hyperallergic

“A satisfyingly complex and relatable story . . . A love story on many levels, and one well worth reading.” —Cynthia Ramsay, Jewish Independent

“From Amy Kurzweil comes anoth­er thought-pro­vok­ing graph­ic mem­oir . . . Kurzweil con­tin­u­al­ly exam­ines what exact­ly it means to love and be human.” —Megan Reynolds, Jewish Book Council

“Even as [Kurzweil] presents complicated concepts (because technology—and Kurzweil!), she deftly enables accessible understanding. Her inviting art is as intricate as photos and screenshots . . . and as simple as a few lines . . . The questions inspire imagination, invention, and intriguing interaction.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Intimate reflections and powerful visual elements combine in an exemplary work of graphic nonfiction.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Kurzweil] reconstructs archival materials in graphic form, including her grandfather’s correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, and memories. This gives the work a collage effect, which works beautifully . . . Kurzweil’s highly recommended memoir is unlike any other. It will leave readers with much to contemplate.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Part meditation on immortality, part profile of the author’s father—inventor and artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil—this finely crafted graphic family memoir from New Yorker cartoonist Kurzweil takes an intimate approach to philosophy . . . This melancholic yet loving investigation gets at how AI is as much about the past and what humanity has already created as it is about the future.” —Publishers Weekly

“A thought-provoking examination of family and identity, artificial intelligence, and the nature of creativity . . . Even those with little interest in AI will connect with the desire to feel known and loved, across time and distance and even across generations . . . A wide-ranging and intellectual memoir, one that insists on the growth that comes through uncertainty.” —Shelf Awareness

“Kurzweil’s extraordinary graphic memoir is a story about memory, family, immortality, artificial intelligence, love and consciousness itself. Far-reaching and fascinating.” —Roz Chast, New Yorker cartoonist

“Powerful, tender, and complex, Kurzweil’s Artificial: A Love Story strikes all the chords. In her drawings, she visualizes the vivid simultaneous perceptions that go into consciousness in a way that feels strikingly accurate. In the story, she pushes past the blank wall one usually hits when trying to fathom death—and plainly asks the questions we wish, more than anything, we could answer.” —Liana Finck, author of Let There Be Light

“Hilarious, heady, and full of feeling, Artificial tells the history of an exceptionally compelling family—a conductor grandfather, a futurist father, an artist daughter and granddaughter—through the lens of technology, art, and memory. Amy Kurzweil draws her way through big questions (What is genius? What is love?) with so much open-hearted wisdom that I wanted to follow her right off the page. It’s a rare artist who can so eloquently move between the personal and the metaphysical: This book is beautiful, strange, and belongs on your bookshelf forever.” —Kristen Radtke, author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

“With her masterful counterbalancing of intricacy and simplicity, repetition and surprise, subtle detail and stark contrast, Kurzweil is at the peak of her powers as a cartoonist. Artificial is a poignant record of a daughter’s clear-eyed devotion to her quixotic genius of a father, of her finding true love despite everything, and of the sources of her own quirky gift for conquering time and space with nothing more than paper, pencil and ink. I absolutely adored this book.” —Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

“Thoughtful, touching, and deeply human. Artificial invites us to think and feel deeply about the nature of human connection, and the forces—and people—that give shape to our lives. A beautiful story, told beautifully.” —Brian Christian, bestselling author of The Most Human Human and The Alignment ProblemAMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.

She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIRED and many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.CN

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