Saturday, March 05, 2005
Dean Bakopoulos
I completely dropped the ball on the release of Dean Bakopoulos's book, Please Don't Come Back From the Moon. Here's a link to his author website (really a fine site, great design, excellent background photographs). Here's how to order the book at Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor (Before Dean managed Canterbury Books in Madison, he studied writing under Charles Baxter at Michigan). I'd order it over the phone and see if they still have signed copies from the event. Dean - I'm so sorry I didn't get this up before your tour started!!
Don't miss this one:
March 18 - Politics and Prose, Washington DC
Here's how I describe Please Don't Come Back From the Moon to people:
It's about working class Detroit when the auto companies left and the city declined. The story takes a neighborhood where in the span of a few weeks, all of the fathers and men disappear. Their children create a story that the dads all went to the moon. Soon the community alters in unforeseeable ways. The mothers take on jobs, some of them factory jobs, and begin spending nights at the local pub the way the men used to. Teenagers take on more family responsibility and grow up faster. The main character is a young man who has to navigate this terrain and learn how to grow up in the absence of a father figure, while at the same time learning how to become a strong enough man to resist the temptation to "go to the moon" himself.
It sounds like a very personal story, and it is, but I think it's going to resonate with a lot of people. The buzz is excellent for this book.
Here is the Book Sense Picks recommendation (from another great Madison bookseller!):
PLEASE DON'T COME BACK FROM THE MOON: A Novel, by Dean Bakopoulos (Harcourt, $23, 0151011354) "This honest first novel follows 16-year-old Michael Smolij and his friends as they stumble towards manhood in a working-class neighborhood outside of Detroit, where jobs and the American dream have vanished along with the young men's fathers. Michael and his friends reach adulthood with ambivalence about their roles in society in this novel that looks at the changing face of manhood in the heartland of America." --Sandi Torkildson, A Room of One's Own, Madison, WI
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Don't miss this one:
March 18 - Politics and Prose, Washington DC
Here's how I describe Please Don't Come Back From the Moon to people:
It's about working class Detroit when the auto companies left and the city declined. The story takes a neighborhood where in the span of a few weeks, all of the fathers and men disappear. Their children create a story that the dads all went to the moon. Soon the community alters in unforeseeable ways. The mothers take on jobs, some of them factory jobs, and begin spending nights at the local pub the way the men used to. Teenagers take on more family responsibility and grow up faster. The main character is a young man who has to navigate this terrain and learn how to grow up in the absence of a father figure, while at the same time learning how to become a strong enough man to resist the temptation to "go to the moon" himself.
It sounds like a very personal story, and it is, but I think it's going to resonate with a lot of people. The buzz is excellent for this book.
Here is the Book Sense Picks recommendation (from another great Madison bookseller!):
PLEASE DON'T COME BACK FROM THE MOON: A Novel, by Dean Bakopoulos (Harcourt, $23, 0151011354) "This honest first novel follows 16-year-old Michael Smolij and his friends as they stumble towards manhood in a working-class neighborhood outside of Detroit, where jobs and the American dream have vanished along with the young men's fathers. Michael and his friends reach adulthood with ambivalence about their roles in society in this novel that looks at the changing face of manhood in the heartland of America." --Sandi Torkildson, A Room of One's Own, Madison, WI
