Joseph McElroy, author of the novels Lookout Cartridge, Women and Men, and Actress In The House, and winner of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has this to say about Mike Heppner’s forthcoming fiction collection, The Man Talking Project:
Never in my experience of our literature have I heard a more powerful, awful, funny, and dreadful parental voice discouraging the son from thinking he has a grain of talent—and that’s only the first part of this disturbingly, brilliantly thoughtful deconstruction of how we live now; yet also in its four-part, excruciatingly frank package, how one might make a book and a writer’s effort to sell it. Mike Heppner’s accomplishment goes beyond his first two Knopf novels into the new and challenged no-man’s and everyone’s land of American publishing. A brave achievement.
Mike Heppner’s collection of short fiction, The Man Talking Project, will be available on August 1st, 2012.