Amy Kurzweil

Amy Kurzweil’s comics have been published in the New Yorker and appear regularly in the Huffington Post. Her series GutterFACE is hosted by the literary webcast drDOCTOR. Her prose has appeared in The Toast, Hobart, Washington Square and other publications. Kurzweil has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from The New School. In 2013, she was the recipient of a Norman Mailer Fellowship. She teaches writing and comics at Parsons The New School for Design and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Visit her website here.

 
 
 

ARTIFICIAL: A LOVE STORY (October 2023)

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

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.

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.

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.

Kirkus Starred Review:

“Kurzweil continues to expand the possibilities of the graphic memoir with an exploration of her patrilineal ancestors.

Braiding together the stories of her paternal grandfather, an Austrian conductor and pianist who narrowly escaped Nazi-controlled Vienna, and her father, an early innovator in artificial intelligence research, New Yorker cartoonist Kurzweil, author of Flying Couch, navigates the complexities of recollecting and framing pieces of her family history. Pages expand with maximalist detail that reflects a true-to-life experience of digging into the past, where insights are dispersed between various family memories and physical artifacts often nestled in dusty storage facilities. Stunningly re-created archival materials, from newspaper clippings to handwritten letters, lend visceral impact to each discovery. The story of the Kurzweil family’s innate connection to the vanguard of technology also breaches questions of collective memory and the ways in which technology might become a new conduit for the voices of the past. When do our loved ones really pass into the beyond? Is it when they die or when those who remain no longer remember them? How much can we learn from what remains of our ancestors? An AI chatbot trained on the correspondences of her late grandfather becomes a sometimes-inadequate interlocutor for Kurzweil as she reflects on her own influences and navigates her family’s desire to maintain a connection with the past. Nonetheless, these interactions bear fruit as new questions arise. Couched in the casual conversations among family and the genuine desire to connect and preserve specific memories, these inquiries avoid becoming overburdened by stodgy philosophical ramblings or overly enamored techno-proselytizing. The deeply personal and sometimes frenetic energy of the book delivers an intimate and cohesive vision of the past as well as life lived in the influence of parents and ancestors.

Intimate reflections and powerful visual elements combine in an exemplary work of graphic nonfiction.”

"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

THE FLYING COUCH (2016)

Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil’s debut, tells the stories of three unforgettable women. Amy weaves her own coming-of-age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a therapist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile. Captivated by Bubbe’s story, Amy turns to her sketchbooks, teaching herself to draw as a way to cope with what she discovers. Entwining the voices and histories of these three wise, hilarious, and very different women, Amy creates a portrait not only of what it means to be part of a family, but also of how each generation bears the imprint of the past.

A retelling of the inherited Holocaust narrative now two generations removed, Flying Couch uses Bubbe’s real testimony to investigate the legacy of trauma, the magic of family stories, and the meaning of home. With her playful, idiosyncratic sensibility, Amy traces the way our memories and our families shape who we become. The result is this bold illustrated memoir, both an original coming-of-age story and an important entry into the literature of the Holocaust.

  • Best Memoirs of 2016 list by Kirkus, which calls it: "A debut that enriches and extends the potential of graphic narrative."

  • Best New Graphic Novels list by the New York Times which calls it "ambitious" and "charming".

  • Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Gold Medal award winner, 2016

  • A Junior Library Guild Fall 2016 Selection

“A debut that enriches and extends the potential of graphic narrative.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Flying Couch is a moving, intricate story of identity and family history.” —Ariel Schrag, author of Adam and Awkward and Definition

“Beautiful and strong.” —Miriam Katin, author of Letting it Go and We Are On Our Own

“I read Flying Couch in one sitting, without moving, literally laughed and literally cried.” —Rachel Fershleiser, Director of Publisher Outreach at Tumblr and founder of the Reblog Book Club

“Flying Couch is perfect. It’s perceptive, emotionally on point, surprising and funny in its details, told in an intuitive way that’s completely direct, and about something that matters. This is an important book.” —Liana Finck, author of The Bintel Brief

"Amy Kurzweil's moving debut is a story of trauma and survival, and a search for identity and belonging.” —Tahneer Oksman

“Flying Couch is a wry and deeply moving exploration of what the Holocaust means to the descendants of survivors. Kurzweil artfully weaves her grandmother’s survivor testimony within her own coming of age story.” —LitReactor

“Flying Couch is a moving, intricate story of identity and family history.” —Ariel Schrag, author of Likewise and Awkward and Definition

"Amy Kurzweil's moving debut is a story of trauma and survival, and a search for identity and belonging. Fluctuating, in words and images, from the bubbly to the intense, this graphic memoir exposes the complicated and powerful ways we are shaped by the histories and relationships that anchor us.”—Tahneer Oksman, author of How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?

Rights: Catapult, North American