Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Antkind | 2020 | Charlie Kaufman | Buy |
Charlie Kaufman spent two decades writing screenplays before publishing his first novel. Antkind arrived in 2020, and it reads nothing like a screenplay. The book runs 720 pages and follows B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a pompous film critic who discovers what might be the greatest movie ever made: a three-month-long stop-motion film crafted over ninety years by an elderly man named Ingo Cutbirth. When the film is destroyed in a fire, Rosenberg tries to reconstruct it from memory.
What follows is a sprawl of hallucinations, time travel, clones, alternate realities, and extended digressions on art, identity, and criticism. Kaufman has said he wrote the book to be unfilmable, which makes sense given that his career is built on films. The novel was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Reviews split between admiration for its ambition and exhaustion at its length.