Madison Novelist in NYT's Top 100
New York Times Lists Novel by WHC Director in Top 100 of 2005
MADISON, WI, December 1, 2005 — The Sunday, December 4, 2005 issue of the New York Times Book Review lists Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, the novel by Wisconsin Humanities Council executive director Dean Bakopoulos, as one of this year's 100 "Notable Books of the Year." It is one of only three debut novels on the list.
"An original and brilliant first work of fiction," according to Wisconsin writer Lorrie Moore, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005) chronicles a boy's coming of age in a blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit. A once thriving, largely immigrant community, Bakopolous's fictional (but all too familiar) Maple Rock has been crippled by the economic downturn in the Rust Belt. As the fathers in the neighborhood slowly disappear, their sons, including seventeen year-old Michael Smolij, are forced to forge their own paths toward employment, adulthood, and ultimately domesticity.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon has received rave reviews from The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Publisher's Weekly, and The Washington Post. Film rights have sold to Marc Platt Productions/Universal and foreign editions are forthcoming in the U.K., Spain, and Greece. It will appear in paperback this month.
Bakopoulos is a long-time active member of Wisconsin's literary community. The former buyer and events director of Canterbury Booksellers and founding director of the WHC's Wisconsin Book Festival, Bakopoulos now oversees the programs of the WHC, including the Book Festival, A More Perfect Union, Motheread/Fatheread, the Speakers Bureau, and an extensive statewide grant program.
