Praise for Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon
“Families, heartbreak, political and social comedy—there is little that Dean Bakopoulos doesn't grasp in an articulate, wittily perceptive, and soulful way, before he hands it back to the reader as literary art. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is an original and brilliant first work of fiction.” —Lorrie Moore
“A beautifully smart, comic, and moving narrative about the fathers who disappear and the sons who take their place, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is somehow both realistic and visionary. Its eerie take on the working lives of men and women is like nothing else I've ever read. In this novel Dean Bakopoulos shows us what keeps us on earth, and how, finally, those burdens also tempt us to float away; he also shows us how speculative fiction can co-exist with the grit of daily life. This is a wonderful book.” —Charles Baxter
“Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is a pitch-perfect debut by a fine young novelist. Dean Bakopoulos makes his indelible mark on the coming-of-age novel.” —Robert Olen Butler
“Haunting, sorrowful, and full of humanity, this beautiful novel is an elegy to loss itself. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Ann Packer
“Soft-hearted yet tough-minded, this book somehow manages to fuse those opposites: yearning and scorn. In prose both careful and corrosive, Dean Bakopoulos invites the reader into a cityscape of dreams and harsh reality; we meet both a boy and generation lost and found.” —Nicholas Delbanco
“A portrait of encroaching adulthood that is as hauntingly dreamed-up as it is urgent and funny and real.” —Heidi Julavits
