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Antkind: A Novel  By  cover art

Antkind: A Novel

By: Charlie Kaufman
Narrated by: Fred Berman
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Publisher's summary

The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York.

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 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 civilisation. 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.

©2020 Charlie Kaufman (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Outstanding. Combining his films’ most urgent themes and recurring concerns in a format that supports the digressions and logic-loops he’s so famous for, Charlie Kaufman may have out-Kaufmaned himself." (The i)

"A very strong debut novel, a long, anguished spill of a book, full of buried furies and nervy philosophical expeditions, constantly tossing off sparks of humour and imagination...at once surreal and highly readable." (LA Times)

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Nuggets for bloating

Tasty. Funny. Moreish. Fun. Clever. Interesting. Fresh. Bug Powder Dust for the cerebral sphincter. Buy it.

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Excellent reading of a fantastic book

I loved this book so much. So relentlessly funny! Fred Berman reads with great comic timing too.
Such an enjoyable experience! I’m sad it’s over.

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