Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
$22.27$22.27
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Strong Sword
$8.95
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Follow the author
OK
Antkind: A Novel Hardcover – July 7, 2020
Purchase options and add-ons
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.
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJuly 7, 2020
- Dimensions6.44 x 1.78 x 9.53 inches
- ISBN-100399589686
- ISBN-13978-0399589683
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
“An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . exceptionally good.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A sight to behold . . . Kaufman is a master of language.”—NPR
"Kaufman successfully blends the brain-wrapping narrative complexity of a Reddit wormhole with the laugh-a-page aplomb of Kurt Vonnegut.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Antkind is Kaufman pushing himself to every formal and social limit, no holds barred, bleak and devastating, yet marvelous.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is a whopper of a book, bursting with the driest of humor, the strangest of scenarios, and the most brilliant of observations. It is wholly original, maddening, and marvelous.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book
"Antkind is unbridled Kaufman energy and wit coming up against the limits of the imagination itself: discursive, subversive, and genuinely funny."—Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
“Each page is so stuffed with invention, audacity, and hilarity, it feels like an act of defiance. Antkind is a fever dream you don’t want to be shaken awake from, a thrill ride that veers down stranger and stranger alleys until you find yourself in a reality so kaleidoscopic you will question your own sanity.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“Magnificent, genius, enraging, mysterious, joyous, terrifying, and, above all, hilarious! Within its pages, Antkind might contain the universe.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
“A tribute to the absurdity of story and ego and obsession that manages to criticize all of this as fiercely as it embraces it all, Antkind is as funny and brilliant and utterly idiosyncratic as you could ever hope. I couldn’t put it down, which is saying a lot, because holy shit, is it heavy.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day
“[It commands] attention from start to finish for its ingenuity and narrative dazzle. Film, speculative fiction, and outright eccentricity collide in a wonderfully inventive yarn—and a masterwork of postmodern storytelling.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Pynchonesque . . . Kaufman’s debut brims with screwball satire and provocative reflections on how art shapes people’s perception of the world.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This novel is magnificently imaginative, bringing to mind Beckett, Pynchon, and A. R. Moxon’s more recent The Revisionaries (2019). With this surprisingly breezy read, given its length, Kaufman proves to be a masterful novelist, delivering a tragic, farcical, and fascinating exploration of how memory defines our lives.”—Booklist
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
My beard is a wonder. It is the beard of Whitman, of Rasputin, of Darwin, yet it is uniquely mine. It’s a salt-and-pepper, steel-wool, cotton-candy confection, much too long, wispy, and unruly to be fashionable. And it is this, its very unfashionability, that makes the strongest statement. It says, I don’t care a whit (a Whitman!) about fashion. I don’t care about attractiveness. This beard is too big for my narrow face. This beard is too wide. This beard is too bottom-heavy for my bald head. It is off-putting. So if you come to me, you come to me on my terms. As I’ve been bearded thusly for three decades now, I like to think that my beard has contributed to the resurgence of beardedness, but in truth, the beards of today are a different animal, most so fastidious they require more grooming than would a simple clean shave. Or if they are full, they are full on conventionally handsome faces, the faces of faux woodsmen, the faces of home brewers of beer. The ladies like this look, these urban swells, men in masculine drag. Mine is not that. Mine is defiantly heterosexual, unkempt, rabbinical, intellectual, revolutionary. It lets you know I am not interested in fashion, that I am eccentric, that I am serious. It affords me the opportunity to judge you on your judgment of me. Do you shun me? You are shallow. Do you mock me? You are a philistine. Are you repulsed? You are . . . conventional.
That it conceals a port-wine stain stretching from my upper lip to my sternum is tertiary, secondary at most. This beard is my calling card. It is the thing that makes me memorable in a sea of sameness. It is the feature in concert with my owlish wire-rim glasses, my hawkish nose, my sunken blackbird eyes, and my bald-eagle pate that makes me caricaturable, both as a bird and as a human. Several framed examples from various small but prestigious film criticism publications (I refuse to be photographed for philosophical, ethical, personal, and scheduling reasons) adorn the wall of my home office. My favorite is an example of what is commonly known as the inversion illusion. When hung upside down, I appear to be a Caucasian Don King. As an inveterate boxing enthusiast and scholar, I am amused by this visual pun and indeed used the inverted version of this illustration as the author photo for my book The Lost Religion of Masculinity: Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, A. J. Liebling, and the Sometimes Combative History of the Literature of Boxing, the Sweet Science, and Why. The uncanny thing is that the Don King illusion works in reality as well. Many’s the time, after I perform sirsasana in yoga class, that the hens circle, clucking that I look just like that “awful boxing man.” It’s their way of flirting, I imagine, these middle-aged, frivolous creatures, who traipse, yoga mat rolled under arm or in shoulder-holster, announcing their spiritual discipline to an uncaring world—from yoga to lunch to shopping to loveless marriage bed. But I am there only for the workout. I don’t wear a special outfit or listen to the mishmash Eastern religion sermon the instructor blathers beforehand. I don’t even wear shorts and a T-shirt. Gray dress pants and a white button-down shirt for me. Belt. Black oxfords on feet. Wallet packed thickly into rear right pocket. I believe this makes my point. I am not a sheep. I am not a faddist. It’s the same outfit I wear if on some odd occasion I find myself riding a bicycle in the park for relaxation. No spandex suit with logos all over it for me. I don’t need anyone thinking I am a serious bicycle rider. I don’t need anyone thinking anything of me. I am riding a bike. That is it. If you want to think something about that, have at it, but I don’t care. I will admit that my girlfriend is the one who has gotten me on a bike and into the yoga classroom. She is a well-known TV actress, famous for her role as a wholesome but sexy mom in a 1990s sitcom and many television movies. You would certainly know who she is. You might say I, as an older, intellectual writer, am not “in her league,” but you’d be mistaken. Certainly when we met at a book signing of my prestigious small-press critical biography of—
Something (deer?) dashes in front of my car. Wait! Are there deer here? I feel like I’ve read that there are deer here. I need to look it up. The ones with fangs? Are there deer with fangs? I think there is such a thing—a deer with fangs—but I don’t know if I’ve imagined it, and if I haven’t, I don’t know why I associate them with Florida. I need to look it up when I arrive. Whatever it was, it is long gone.
I am driving through blackness toward St. Augustine. My mind has wandered into the beard monologue, as it so often does on long car trips. Trips of any kind. I’ve delivered it at book signings, at a lecture on Jean-Luc Godard at the 92nd Street Y Student Residence Dining Hall Overflow Room. People seem to enjoy it. I don’t care that they do, but they do. I’m just sharing that piece of trivia because it’s true. Truth is my master in all things, if I can be said to have a master, which I cannot. Ninety degrees, according to the outside temperature gauge on my car. Eighty-nine percent humidity, according to the perspiratory sheen on my forehead (at Harvard, I was affectionately known as the Human Hygrometer). A storm of bugs in the headlights, slapping the windshield, smeared by my wipers. My semiprofessional guess is a swarm of the aptly named lovebug—Plecia nearctica—the honeymoon fly, the double-headed bug, so called because they fly conjoined, even after the mating is complete. It is this kind of postcoital cuddling I find so enjoyable with my African American girlfriend. You would recognize her name. If the two of us could fly through the Florida night together thusly, I would in a second agree to it, even at the risk of splattering against some giant’s windshield. I find myself momentarily lost in that sensual and fatal scenario. An audible splat wakes me from this diversional road trip reverie, and I see that a particularly large and bizarre insect has smashed into the glass, smack in the center of what I estimate is the northwest quadrant of the windshield.
The highway is empty, the nothingness on either side of me interrupted by an occasional fluorescent fast-food joint, open but without customers. No cars in the parking lots. The names are unfamiliar: Slammy’s. The Jack Knife. Mick Burger. Something sinister about these places isolated in the middle of nothing. Who are they feeding? How do they get their supplies? Do frozen-patty trucks come here from some Slammy’s warehouse somewhere? Hard to imagine. Probably a mistake to drive here from New York. I thought it would be meditative, would give me time to think about the book, about Marla, about Daisy, about Grace, about how far I seem to be from anything I’d ever envisioned for myself. How does that happen? Can I even know who I was before the world got its hands on me and turned me against myself into this . . . thing?
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (July 7, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399589686
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399589683
- Item Weight : 2.23 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.44 x 1.78 x 9.53 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #465,282 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #928 in Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction (Books)
- #3,927 in Fiction Satire
- #23,046 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Can thonself even write a review of a savage sendup of review/criticism culture? Would I not be playing directly into the author's point?
I'm evaluating this novel on two levels. The first and most important is entertainment level--this book was crazy funny. Like, seriously, how often do you laugh out loud when reading a novel? I lol-ed on average every few pages, minimum. At first I wasn't sure if I was happy with the book because I was so entertained, but I was asking myself, "but will there be more...substance?" More on that in part 2. I still have to talk about how funny this book was. And it's absolutely signature Charlie Kaufman--the transition from screen writing to novel writing seems completely seamless. It's dizzying, maddening, confusing, maniacally recursive...and if you like Kaufman, that's what you're here for. And I was HERE for it. The obvious peer to this book is A Confederacy of Dunces. I have to believe that Kaufman was somewhat inspired by that book. I won't say it's better, because I need to sit and marinate in this story over the next decade and see how it turns out. One really helpful takeaway I took is that there are just so many throw away one-liners, which is awesome. But when you see those in his movies you think "is there a deeper meaning there, is that a plot twist?" et chetera when something crazy happens (like when the wife in Synechdoche reveals her surprise full back tattoo). So this helps me when watching his movies that if something insanely funny but also zany/unrealistic happens it's just Charlie making us laugh and you don't necessarily need to parse for deeper meaning. But of course it always also works on the level that reality is fully absurd and we should not be taking it seriously, at all. That's ALWAYS Charlie's point.
Second level of analysis--how did this work as a story? You know, the more I sit back and kind of think, the more connections I see. Just as with his movies, I'm sure that repeat readings are highly, highly rewarded. As soon as a finished I went back to the beginning, as, sure enough, things that were weird upon first reading will now make sense.
The thing is--the book is perfect. It's not perfect in that it probably could be 400-500 pages, and sometimes the crazy is so thick to even exasperate the most diehard Kaufman fan--but that's the thing. Charlie is singular, and can only be compared to thonself. In the end Charlie weaves a story to make the points he always returns to--we're all crazy and cracked, how can we really know anything, best that we just do the best we can and let others do the same--BUT, even though that's the answer, we always screw it up. We miss each other, miss the point, we're vainly ambitious, and we're pretty much hopeless--yet we do experience moments of beauty and bliss, and life is actually pretty funny if you don't take it too seriously.
How did he do that? If I had read it in eBook form, I could understand that, he could simply have downloaded a new book to my Kindle while I was asleep. But how do you make that happen with a printed book? I guess it must be some kind of frighteningly advanced technology with which I'm totally unfamiliar.
Now that I've read the book twice in a forward direction, I have to read it upside down, and then backwards. Upside down should not be too difficult, as I've had lots of practice reading confidential memos that coworkers have inadvisably left on their desks. (Who hasn't?) But I'm not sure of how I should go about reading it backwards.
Should I read it one letter at a time? I wouldn't think I'd find too many actual words in the text that way, but maybe that's the point. What about one word at a time? At least the words would make sense, which would be an advantage, but the sentences would mostly be nonsensical. If I read one paragraph at a time, the readability would improve, but I'm not sure that it would make a lot more sense. One page at a time would be interesting, but authors are not really responsible for the way their material breaks on a page, so that doesn't sound like an especially productive procedure.
Which is why I'm leaning toward reading Antkind backwards one chapter at a time. I'll let you know how that works out.
I mean, I suppose I have to give the guy kudos for not making this something easily digestible. I don't blame anyone for not making it to the end of Antkind even slightly. If you do push through it I would recommend treating it like a wacky, hallucinogenic roller coaster. One page this crazy thing happens! Two pages later we're doing something completely different and even more crazy! Plot threads are folded in on one another and twisted and tied into knots that Kaufman only really appears to have a halfhearted desire to untie once he's tied them.
You could make the argument that there are big chunks of this thing that could be cut out. Our lead character goes on long, overblown side trips of becoming obsessed with various women and driving himself insane in various ways along the way, and most of that could be neatly excised from the text and Kaufman's ultimate points would still shine through. I'm sure Kaufman himself would claim that every absurdist element present here is necessary, and I would be lying if I didn't at least appreciate almost every page of this book for the sheer circus act that Kaufman forces his words to perform. Long sentences, puns on top of puns, mutating well known words for no purpose other than to seemingly give them an alien quality and make them feel all the less real and relevant to our world (except for Judd Apatow, Kaufman has some BEEF with Judd Apatow, but he has even more beef with himself apparently).
In the end, if the words and the absurdity have carried you all the way through this thing you will have realized that the message that is being evoked here is really the same message Kaufman always brings to the table: a meditation on life's meaning, the quest to be seen and loved and validated, and how that is ultimately our curse.
There are beautiful moments of writing sprinkled all throughout this thing, wonderful moments of real poetry that I imagine would speak to any reader. The trouble is they are little tiny pearls stuffed into the diseased, rotting mind of an unlikable protagonist, and so it will certainly try your patience to get there.
I would recommend it if you're up for some adventurous writing from somebody who is undoubtedly a brilliant writer that has some stuff to say, but has no interest in saying that stuff even remotely coherently. Many have claimed that this book is proof that Kaufman works best when collaborating with another director in film, and I don't necessarily disagree. This is a mind that is uncomfortable to spend long periods of time in, and needs a filter to a degree. But if you're the adventurous type, go for it. At the very least I think everyone who has read this thing in full can agree it is pretty unlike anything you have ever read before.
Top reviews from other countries
To quote Antkind: ‘I don’t know what the audience would be for a book outlining a non-existent film.’
The book is about a three month long film, and the main characters attempts to both remember and recreate it. It’s an immersive experience and I found the setup to be wonderfully enjoyable. The middle was a bit more directionless. False starts and tangents aplenty. Kaufman pokes fun at himself via the film critic narrator (sort of endlessly. It’s a bit too heavy with self-deprecation) while praising Judd Apatow in comparison.
Antkind is funny, farcical, insane and dense. Sometimes I was questioning whether Kaufman was inventing a concept or whether it was actually real. One small gripe for example (perhaps one of you / thon that have read the novel can answer?), if Barassini was partially responsible for the invention of Braino in 2006 (approx.) then how could Abbitha journey back to 1983 and offer the story of Trunks to Barbosae at that time? 1983 was pre Braino, right? (Answer in the comments!) This single question should give you some indication of the level of detail in the book, and perhaps some of the madness.
I liked the ending and I’m really glad I did. I have my own interpretation of it, which I don’t need to put here, and I’m sure you’ll have yours. I liked the comparison of people being on a coach bus in transit. I enjoyed Calcium. I hope Jim Carrey gets a bicycle (in joke). If you’re receptive to this piece of art you might just become enveloped by it.
I will conclude with another quote from Antkind: ‘Is it a masterwork? Is it a sham? Am I being enlightened, or am I being conned? It is, it occurs to me, nothing more and nothing less than I bring to it.’