Mandelbrot the Magnificent is a stunning, magical pseudo-biography of Benoit Mandelbrot as he flees into deep mathematics to escape the rise of Hitler
Born in the Warsaw ghetto and growing up in France during the rise of Hitler, Benoit Mandelbrot found escape from the cruelties of the world around him through mathematics. Logic sometimes makes monsters, and Mandelbrot began hunting monsters at an early age. Drawn into the infinite promulgations of formulae, he sinks into secret dimensions and unknown wonders.
His gifts do not make his life easier, however. As the Nazis give up the pretense of puppet government in Vichy France, the jealousy of Mandelbrot’s classmates leads to denunciation and disaster. The young mathematician must save his family with the secret spaces he’s discovered, or his genius will destroy them.
About the Author
LIZ ZIEMSKA is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions: 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize XLI, and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews
"We will never know the full extent of what we lost in the Holocaust — what histories, what innovations, what music and science and literatures we might have had. In Mandelbrot the Magnificent, the talented and imaginative, the impeccable Liz Ziemska has fashioned a beautiful story about one famous survivor and the magic and mathematics he’s brought to the world." —Karen Joy Fowler
"Mandelbrot the Magnificent is completely persuasive in its magical-realist rendering of the émigré experience in occupied France in World War II. Even as it’s wrenching in its delineation of how unjustly the fortunate and unfortunate are separated by extremity, it’s uplifting in the way it reminds us just how infinitely resourceful we can be — even if history is our very own Book of Monsters – when it comes to the magic-making of truly loving the world and each other." —Jim Shepard
“Pure delight and a sense of play right up against the gravity and horrors of history; this is writing that moves into different tones with such ease and joy, even at its most serious.” —Aimee Bender