Recent Antkind News

If you're in San Francisco May 14, you can catch Charlie at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, where he'll be discussing his novel Antkind. YAY. Get in quick, though.

Says City Arts & Lectures: "Orchestra Tickets ($45) come with a copy of Kaufman’s new novel, Antkind."

UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled for July 13.

Had some computer problems, so I've been posting the last couple of updates on the FB and Twitter pages. This was one of those things: Charlie will be appearing with Susan Orlean at the Dynasty Typewriter At The Haworth At The Haworth, Los Angeles, on May 15. They'll be discussing Antkind, among other things. Not sure if there are tickets left, so get in quick.

UPDATE: it seems publication of Charlie's book has been delayed until July. Probably this means the event with Susan Orlean will be postponed as well, but I can't say for sure. If you're interested, you should call 'em and check.

In the U.S., Antkind will be published by Random House. In the UK and Australia (and probably other places), it'll be published by HarperCollins, which means we get a different cover.

Ta-da:

This is news to me, but apparently it's been known since around October. In the same month that Charlie publishes Antkind, his publisher will be releasing Memoirs and Misinformation, a Kaufman-sounding novel co-written by Jim Carrey and featuring Kaufman himself.

From Random House:

A couple days after you read it here, Entertainment Weekly made it official:

[...] The Oscar-winning screenwriter behind such acclaimed cult-classics as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York, and Anomalisa has landed a deal with Random House to publish his debut novel, Antkind, EW can announce exclusively. The publisher, which originally acquired the book in 2012, describes it as a “mind-bending opus.”

[...]“There are no budgetary limitations in a novel,” [Charlie] said in a statement. “There is no studio oversight. There are no focus groups. In fact, this book is in part about that; it’s about an impossible movie.”

Ben Greenberg, VP and Executive Editor at Random House, adds: “I’ve been talking to Charlie about this novel for almost eight years and watching it change and recalibrate and grow. Antkind is a hilarious, devastating, epic mindf–k. I’ve never read anything else like it.” (Source)

They also exclusively reveal the cover BCK showed you a couple days earlier.

HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS, IT'S HAPPENING. There's a cover for Antkind now on Amazon and some of the other various bookselly sites. Not only that, there's now a plot outline for what we previously knew only as "an unfilmable novel about an impossible movie."

Says the blurb:

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.
 
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 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. (Source)

This definitely sounds like what I was expecting. 720 pages, a little David Foster Wallace, a little Synecdoche, a little Frank or Francis, all Charlie K. Release date is still listed as May 20 next year, and there's a pre-order link. Even so, I wouldn't yet put money on that release date. THINGS CAN CHANGE.

Big big thanks to Tom!

Amazon UK now list Antkind's release date as 14 May 2020, with 336 pages.

Amazon US have it as 6 February 2020.

Both sites list Charlie as the author, and the temporary cover image lists William Mulligam as the author.

Why? I don't know. WHY?

But here's a thing: Antkind has a second page on Amazon US, where Random House is listed as the publisher, the release date is May 12, the page count sits at 752 (which is about what I'd expected from Charlie, to be honest), and there's no reference to William Mulligam. In the US, Charlie was originally slated to be published by Grand Central, a division of Hachette. Random House are an entirely different company. Has Charlie switched publishers? Is that somehow connected to the new William Mulligam image on the old Amazon page? Or has Amazon lost its mind? Or have I lost mine?

I Googled "William Mulligam" and only pages for this book came up. So then I Googled "Mulligam" by itself, and "Mulligam Syndrome" and "Mulligam Disorder," because Charlie likes weird mental disorders and has a hankering for giving characters names with hidden meanings (Synecdoche, New York's Caden Cotard was named for Cotard delusion, and Charlie originally wrote Anomalisa for the stage under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli, after Fregoli delusion)... but I came up with nothing.

Any ideas?

The good news is if you Google "Antkind," a whole load of publishers and bookstores show up in the results (e.g. HarperCollins here in Australia), which means Charlie's novel (OR WILLIAM'S) is so far still a thing that is actually happening. There are pre-order buttons here and there, but I wouldn't count on the release date until we see some marketing for the book.

Thanks to Livia, Jonah, Thomas, and u/staresAwkwardly on r/kaufman