Dean Bakopoulos' first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times Notable Book; he co-wrote and co-produced the film adaptation, which debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was a New York Times Critics' Pick. His second novel, My American Unhappiness, was named one of the year's best novels by The Chicago Tribune, and his third novel, Summerlong, was an independent bookstore bestseller and is now in development as a television series.
The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction, Bakopoulos is an associate professor of cinema and head of screenwriting arts at University of Iowa. A WGA screenwriter, he co-wrote the film adaptation of his first novel and is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO MAX series Made for Love. His first feature film, Don't Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times' Critics Pick directed by Bruce Thierry Cheung and starring Rashida Jones. Bakopoulos is currently developing several original projects for television at major studios and production companies, including an adaptation on his short story, "The Dog."
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.
"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.
The summer Michael Smolij turns sixteen, his father disappears. One by one other men also vanish from the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit where their fathers before them had 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."
