Pike's Folly

Hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “a fearsome cultural critic disguised in novelist’s clothing,” Mike Heppner now offers a hilarious, scathing, and ultimately endearing account of a multigenerational search for the fully, perhaps overly, examined life and the pandemonium that ensues. Nathaniel Pike—a self-proclaimed Emersonian and self-aggrandizing gazillionaire infamous for developing costly projects utterly devoid of purpose—is purchasing a parcel of federal wilderness in New Hampshire with the intention of paving it over. While his assistant uses Pike as a cash machine, an excuse for writer’s block, and a distraction from his wife’s budding exhibitionist career, the Interior Department bureaucrat brokering the land hopes to pocket Pike’s money but skirt the scandal promised him by various activists. Meanwhile, Rhode Island’s other gazillionaire enlists Pike to help shore up his faltering philanthropies, an overture that enrages his daughter but delights her boyfriend, to whom Pike is a heroic pioneer of transgressive cinema and, incredibly, a friend of his hero, Brian Wilson. In this round-robin of folly, Heppner turns a merciless eye on cultural malfeasances from the digital avant-garde to disingenuous tax reform—even as the participants in Pike’s Folly gradually capture our sympathy, caught as they are in a richly comic and humane version of this hugely imperfect world.

Literature & Fiction

Heppner, Mike

United States

KNOPF

With astonishing scope, flair and originality, Mike Heppner’s debut explores our secret lives and most desperate impulses even as they are penetrated by a global web of mysterious provenance and dubious promise. Few who live in Big Dipper Township have even heard about anything called the Egg Code; they’re busy enough as it is. At one end of this tiny Midwestern community, a motivational speaker starts choking on his own words, while at another, an impressionable dancer struggles to realize her recurrent dreams of flying. An estranged wife becomes a counterfeit folklorist, while an aging typographer is besieged by regret. And—in one household—a “living arrangements” salesman is harried to the verge of losing his livelihood, while his wife stage-mothers their talentless son and eventually decides to take destiny into her own hands. Also nearby, however, is a lone hacker bent on destroying the demon among them all: a router, the Gloria 21169, that, along with thousands of others, trafficks in information from all the world over to comprise the Internet. But the Gloria, or the corporation that controls it, has taken command of the entire network, at a tremendous cost to this young man’s family and to the consternation of parties on both sides of the technological revolution. The crisscrossing of these many lives reveals how much (if at all) these quantum shifts in our society have affected our hopes, behavior and prospects. As much Our Town as 2001, and as funny as it is suspenseful, The Egg Code is both a hugely entertaining novel and the announcement of a spectacular career.

The Egg Code

Olden Field is a solitary computer hacker, whose ultimate purpose is the destruction of the Gloria 21169, a monstrous router that has taken control of the Internet. Motivational speaker Derek Skye finds himself sickened by the advice he spews to his legions of fans. Meanwhile, his ex-wife Donna fabricates folklore to assist those looking for guidance in our troubled times. Her friend Lydia Mould-Tree is determined to see her talentless son, Simon, achieve celebrity, so she bullies her complacent husband into getting Simon his big break in a company advertising campaign. As only the most accomplished fiction can, The Egg Code brings them together with a host of others in a sweeping, comic, wildly entertaining narrative. In this audacious literary debut, Mike Heppner concocts a brilliantly realized, impeccably structured mediation on the value of information in our information-saturated time.

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

Nathaniel Pike, a headstrong billionaire, is purchasing a piece of federal land in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and turning it into a huge, inaccessible parking lot. Orbiting Pike and his aspirations is a cast of perfectly flawed eccentrics: Marlene, who is shy and vulnerable but also a budding exhibitionist; Stuart, Pike’s assistant, who is Marlene’s husband and a failed writer; and Heath, who films Marlene’s public nudity and turns her into an Internet star. In this grand tale of the folly of the modern world, Mike Heppner skewers the extravagance of wealth, and the class that grows up around that wealth, even as he casts a humane look at the people involved.

Triumphs and failures of life as a writer turn tangible in this four-sided fiction. A ten-year-old boy's father lectures on the folly of taking a teacher's praise to heart. A writer details the dreamlike landing of a two-novel deal, and the feeling of abandonment when his publisher is too governed by the bottom line to take risks on later novels. A successful writer counsels a beginner so anxious to write something worthwhile that she's dying from lack of sleep. With honest, precise prose and indelible characters, these and other narratives within The Man Talking Project flesh out what inspires, torments, and sometimes defeats the devoted artist.

The Man Talking Project

another sky press

We Came All This Way is the first novel in eight years from the author whom Entertainment Weekly calls ... a fearsome cultural critic disguised in a novelist’s clothing,” and the Washington Post calls ... a young master of this old art.” It’s the story of Roseanne Okerfeldt, a thirty-one year old mother of four who finds her life in Grand Rapids, Michigan stultifying, and runs off with her brother and eldest child to live on a decommissioned oil rig in the middle of the North Atlantic. There, Roseanne and the thirty-seven other residents of Mobility” (as they call their new home) struggle against the elements and their own basic oddness to establish an independent society based on utopian principles of cooperation and self-sufficiency. As the months pass, the pressure increases on Roseanne to return to Michigan and confront her former life, while Mobility itself - with its delicate balance of extreme personalities - splinters toward chaos. 
 Roseanne tells her own story in a comic, aware, and self-deprecating voice, starting with her childhood in suburban Ohio, her early marriage and pregnancies, and her experiences on Mobility, which involve pirate attacks, the vague omens of a Belgian soothsayer, and a man with blue skin. We Came All This Way is about finding a place in the world and trying to grow up before your kids do.

We Came All This Way: A Novel

Prospecta Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heppner, Mike. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Heppner, Mike

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heppner, Mike. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pike's Folly

The Egg Code

The Egg Code

Pike's Folly

The Man Talking Project

We Came All This Way: A Novel