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Antkind

About the Book

Antkind

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider --- a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made --- a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete --- B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius.

All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être.

A searing indictment of the modern world, ANTKIND is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy and the very nature of existence itself --- the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.

Antkind
by Charlie Kaufman

  • Publication Date: July 6, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 720 pages
  • Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
  • ISBN-10: 0399589694
  • ISBN-13: 9780399589690