Dean Bakopoulos

The author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon and My American Unhappiness delivers his breakout novel: a deft and hilarious exploration of the simmering tensions beneath the surface of a contented marriage which explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small town over the course of a long, hot summer. In the sweltering heat of one summer in a small Midwestern town, Claire and Don Lowry discover that married life isn’t quite as they’d predicted. One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll, only to wake up the next morning stoned, and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run—only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town’s adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused. Claire, Don, and their neighbors and friends find themselves on an existential odyssey, exploring the most puzzling quandaries of marriage and maturity. When does a fantasy become infidelity? When does compromise become resentment? When does routine become boring monotony? Can Claire and Don survive everything that befalls them in this one summer, forgive their mistakes, and begin again? Award-winning writer Dean Bakopoulos delivers a brutally honest and incredibly funny novel about the strange and tenuous ties that bind us, and the strange and unlikely places we find connection. Full of mirth, melancholy, and redemption, Summerlong explores what happens when life goes awry.

A Novel

Summerlong

When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers and, in the years that follow, experiences along with his friends the same restlessness that carried away their fathers. A first novel. Reprint.

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

My American unhappiness

J. Robert Lennon

Sam Lipsyte

Brian Evenson

George Singleton

Christine Hume

Dan Pope

Kristin Prevallet

Highway 14

When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon. When Michael was sixteen his father left home. He wasn't the first to go. One by one other men in the blue-collar neighbourhood outside Detroit where Michael lives vanish. One props open the door to his shoe store and leaves a note. 'I'm going to the moon,' it reads, 'I took all the cash'. The wives are left behind, and with few jobs and fewer opportunities they drink, brawl, sleep around, and gradually make new lives knowing their husbands are never coming back. Michael and his friends grow up. They try to get an education, start their first jobs, fall in love and begin to build families of their own. Until one night the restlessness of their fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away. This is a haunting, unforgettable début novel of fathers and sons, and of growing up the hard way. Shot through with magic and brimming with humanity, it is a novel for anyone who has even been left longing.

“Why are you so unhappy?” That’s the question that Zeke Pappas, a thirty-three-year-old scholar, asks almost everybody he meets as part of an obsessive project, “The Inventory of American Unhappiness.” The answers he receives—a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint—create a collage of woe. Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women’s magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some “prospects”: a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola (“Why not aim high?”). A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

My American Unhappiness

A principios de los noventa, los padres de familia de un suburbio de Detroit, hundidos por el desempleo y la rutina, empiezan a desaparecer. Uno de ellos deja detrás una nota: “Me voy a la luna”. Le seguirán muchos más: padres abnegados, policías, y hasta el pastor ortodoxo de la localidad también se van a la luna. El protagonista, un adolescente sin demasiadas oportunidades ni metas, tiene que crecer deprisa cuando su padre desaparece. Consigue trabajo y pronto crea su propia familia, pero aunque parece que su vida es feliz y satisfactoria, también él siente la llamada de la luna. Una delicada ópera prima que presenta una sociedad americana en crisis, encerrada en sí misma y donde la obsesión por la felicidad se enfrenta a la fuerza del compromiso.

Dean Bakopoulos

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