Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman, known for writing surrealist movies like Being John Malkovich and Anomalisa, will make his literary debut with an equally bizarre novel.
Kaufman’s first novel, Antkind, will be published by Random House next year, Entertainment Weekly reports.
The book will follow B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a film critic and “failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, [and] shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer” who sees a three-month-long stop-motion movie that he’s convinced is the best film ever made. Unfortunately, the film is destroyed, leading Rosenberg to attempt to re-create it from memory.
“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,” Random House says. “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.”
Fittingly for a book about a 90-day-long movie, the novel is 720 pages.
Although Antkind will be Kaufman’s first book, it’s not the screenwriter’s first literary venture. He’s written movies inspired by books by Susan Orlean (Adaptation, based— loosely and bizarrely—on The Orchid Thief), Chuck Barris (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and Iain Reid (the forthcoming I’m Thinking of Ending Things).
Antkind is slated for publication on May 12, 2020.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
