Mike Kleine

Le mont Arafat

Arafat Mountain

May 21, 2021
Novel
168 pages
140 × 180 mm
19 €
9782377560684
978-2-3775-6068-4
Translated from English by Quentin Leclerc
																Mike Kleine, Le mont Arafat
																Mike Kleine, Le mont Arafat

In Arafat Mountain, there is all literature, in all its forms. In Arafat Mountaint, some characters go to a castle. Someone watches a Woody Allen movie, and cries. There is Arafat Mountain, where it is said that Mohammed gave one of his last sermons. A plane disappears. There are parallel universes, and, of course, space-time travel. An island with prisoners. It is most certainly the end of the world. Gods eat other gods. And, in a room somewhere, there is a lever that, above all, you must never touch.

Imagine all the horrors and deaths you’ve already heard about, then imagine all the universes and crazy landscapes they come from. Add volcanoes, meteors, home invasions, suicides, Ferraris and accidents, then pull the lever and see what happens. Maybe something terrible, maybe something weird, it depends on the universe. Is it the end of the world? Does it matter?

In Arafat Mountain, Mike Kleine, like Roberto Bolano in Antwerp, deploys an incredible gift for collage, weaving derisory micro-stories together in such a way as to produce a mixed sensation of yellow laughter, despair, and cosmic horror, from which, strangely enough, springs an obvious beauty.

The author

Mike Kleine was born in West Africa in 1988. He graduated from Grinnel College with a degree in French literature, and lives and works in the Mid-West. He composes electronic music, creates video games (interactive fiction and, recently, “bitsy” games), and writes novels. Since La Ferme des Mastodontes (trans. by Quentin Leclerc, L’Ogre, 2019, originally published by Atlatl Press, 2012), he has also published Arafat Mountain (Atlatl Press, 2014,), Kanley Stubrick (We Heard You Like Books, 2016), The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish (Plays Inverse Press, 2016), and, most recently, Lonely Men Club (Inside the Castle, 2018), a 100,000-word, five-day computer-generated novel about the manifestations across time and space of the Zodiac Killer.

Press

“These pages are like haute cuisine, thousands of lives distilled together to compose something tasty and beautiful. Cosmic magic stirs on every page, and speedboats and celestial disasters scare up the surroundings of Arafat Mountain. Every subtlety is sumptuous, every page a journey. These pages are full of death and I wonder—has death ever been so delicious?”

Frank Hinton, author of, Action, Figure.

“Take Kanye West, inject him with cosmological omnipotence and the desire to kill, and he will end up writing Arafat Mountain. It’s a strange guide to the inner mores of those who are both rich and violent.”

Ken Baumann, author of, Solip.
May 21, 2021
Novel
168 pages
140 × 180 mm
19 €
9782377560684
978-2-3775-6068-4
Translated from English by Quentin Leclerc