Dive in with Kimball Art Center’s book club to discuss Charlie Kaufman’s bold and hilarious debut novel, Antkind. The evening will feature engaging discussions, inspiring insights, community connection, and refreshments. It is free to attend. Seth Taylor, a filmmaker and film professor at Utah Valley University, will lead our discussion as we explore the absurd, laugh-out-loud novel by the Oscar®-winning writer behind Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

About the novel:

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 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 civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmar escape 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 degenerately 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.

Reviews of Antkind:

“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