Dean Bakopoulos: 3 books

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,...

This tale of young men growing up in a working-class Michigan town without fathers to guide them is “melancholy, surreal, and funny all at once” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). The summer Michael turns seventeen, his father disappears. One by one, other men also vanish from the blue-collar...

“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...