Today is release day for Mike Kleine’s debut play, The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish! We’re so, so proud to be publishing this book, and can’t wait for you to get your hands on it. We’ll be updating the catalog to reflect the release soon, but order today to enjoy pre-order discounts and free and immediate shipping while the getting’s good! Trust us, whether you’re a fan of bizarro fiction, experimental theatre, or just hybrid forms, you need to read this book. http://ow.ly/CLVU302fz1C
A lot of people have asked me what I look for when considering Plays Inverse titles, and I've given a lot of (hopefully nonconflicting) answers over the last few years. Without fail, though, the submissions that stand out most are the ones that still surprise me... The ones that manage to do things that, despite all my reading, I've never seen done in a play before. And Mike Kleine's The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish is without a doubt one of those plays. Throw in the genuine wit and insight of Mike's writing and there was just no way I could say no. This is our shortest release to date, but in a lot of ways one of our most ambitious. I think you'll love it, but even if you don't, it'll get you thinking about the intersection of theatre and fiction in ways you might not have before. It certainly worked for me. But then again, I'm biased. Here's what other people are saying about 17PF:
"Wild, nonsensical, possibly cursed, and almost certainly unperformable, Mike Kleine's The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish reads like a transcript of Raymond Roussel's deathbed confession or a fever dream taking place somewhere just outside the frame of a David Lynch film."
- James Tadd Adcox, author of Does Not Love
"Any attempt to stage Mike Kleine's The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish might trigger the apocalypse. Kleine has accomplished something rare with this book: the page itself becomes a kind of theatre, a dadaist take on the drawing room play juxtaposed with lists that would make Rabelais jealous, menacing prophecies, and characters so unstable even their names won't stay in place."
- Christian TeBordo, author of Toughlahoma
"In The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish, stuff explodes without a sound, morphing into bits of coloured paper. Nothing is where it belongs. Nothing is where you expect it to be. Black men appear out of the sun then disappear a moment later. No one remains who they are for very long. Characters constantly change their names. Stage directions include occurrences that no one can see. You'll come away believing—and even hungering for—the stuff that has always been right there in front of you, stuff that you'll never see or hear or touch or feel, stuff you can only imagine, stuff whose very power lies in its intangibility."
- Ken Sparling, author of This Poem Is a House
"Imagine a metaphysical domestic drama performed amidst an apocalyptic invasion of mythical beasts, celebrities, bad vibes, and landlocked marine life where God himself is a disgruntled audience member. You don't have to. This is it."
- Simon Jacobs, author of Saturn
"Mike Kleine makes you question both the reality of who his characters are in relation to each other and your own sense of truth. In The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish the scope of his world is both epic and historically sweeping and quite small and awkward. The minutia of detail keeps the story on the edge, and the discoveries made in the moment are like just letting go on that one roller coaster that always scared you as a kid, but now, as an adult, you're like—fuck it, why the hell not—this is probably what it's all about anyway."
- Trish Harnetiaux, author of How To Get Into Buildings
Order today: http://ow.ly/CLVU302fz1C
