

- New York Times reviewed, Fiction, satire, Fiction, humorous, general, Film critics
"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 be te noire and his raison d'e tre."--
Log it
Sign in to log this.
Character
Comic, contemporary, prestige and open-ended.
- gravecomic
- contemporarynostalgic
- unpretentiousprestige
- resolvedopen-ended
- earnestironic
Who loves it, who doesn't
No profiled raters yet.
Ask the title
A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
No reviews yet.
About the book
- Author
- Charlie Kaufman
- First published
- 2020
- Pages
- 720
- Publisher
- Random House Trade Paperbacks, Random House, Random House, Incorporated
- Editions
- 6
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9780008319496
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 1 have read it and 12 want to.
Similar in taste
Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Tastebuds Other media included when they land close.
Erasure 200174% alikeBoth contemporary, prestige.
Rejection 202472% alikeBoth contemporary, comic, prestige.
Portnoy's Complaint 196968% alikeBoth contemporary, prestige.
In persuasion nation 200665% alikeBoth contemporary, prestige.
The Sluts 200564% alikeBoth contemporary, prestige, open-ended; this one is more grave.
Both contemporary, prestige, open-ended.
The Sellout 201563% alikeBoth comic, contemporary, prestige.
No One Is Talking About This 202163% alikeBoth contemporary, prestige, open-ended.
Husbands and Wives 199268% alikeFilm · Both contemporary, prestige.
Problemista 202466% alikeFilm · Both contemporary, prestige, comic.