Antkind

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.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE   A dyspeptic satire that owes much to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon . . . propelled by Kaufman s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull s-eye wit." The Washington Post

An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . an exceptionally good [book]. The New York Times Book Review   Kaufman is a master of language . . . a sight to behold. NPR 

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND MEN S HEALTH

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 ninety 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.