Please Don't Come Back From The Moon - Hardcover

"By deftly welding magic realism with social satire, Bakopoulos captures the dark side of the working-class dream."--The New York Times Book Review

The year Michael Smolij turns seventeen, the men vanish from the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit where their fathers before them lived, raised families, and, in a more promising era, worked. One man props open the door to his shoe store and leaves a note. "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash." Unable to leave the neighborhood where they have been abandoned, Michael and his friends stumble through their twenties, until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.

"Please Don't Come Back From the Moon is a terrific novel--deeply original, smart, funny and heartbreaking . . . It's a story for all of us--sons and wives and daughters, too, of the missing, the disappeared, the men on the moon."--Buffalo News

"A graceful debut . . . Something about [Michael's] earnestness and the hopelessness of it nearly broke my heart."--Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press

Dean Bakopoulos, a former bookseller, has published fiction in Zoetrope and other journals and was named one of America's best new fiction writers by Virginia Quarterly in 2004. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dean Bakopoulos, a former bookseller, has published fiction in Zoetrope and other journals and was named one of America's best new fiction writers by Virginia Quarterly in 2004. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.