Artificial: A Love Story

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.

Author: Amy Kurzweil
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 10/17/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
ISBN: 9781948226387


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 15
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 08/28/2023

About the Author
Amy 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. Her cartooning has been nominated for a Reuben award.

Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Believer, Longreads, Literary Hub, Wired, Catapult, and many other places. Kurzweil has taught at Parsons the New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and in New York City Public Schools.