Novelist Bakopoulos to premiere college-town tale in Greenpoint

Brooklyn BookBeat

June 1, 2015 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Dean Bakopoulos will appear in Brooklyn on June 23 at Greenpoint’s WORD Bookstore to speak about his new book “Summerlong.” Photo by Christina Campbell

Share this:

Dean Bakopoulos, whose work New York Times best-selling author Lorrie Moore has praised as “full of insight and inspiration and the best kind of divine comedy,” returns with the keenly funny and honest “Summerlong.”

Bakopoulos will present his new novel at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint at a June 23 event hosted by Brooklynite and fellow writer Emma Straub.

Mixing the light-hearted with the literary, this third novel from Bakopoulos deftly tackles the subjects of midlife crises and extramarital longing with characteristic humor and aplomb. “‘Summerlong’ is Dean Bakopoulos at his finest,” says Nickolas Butler, author of “Shotgun Lovesongs.” “Daringly funny, heartbreakingly sad and forever on the watch for redemption. This is a book for any season, any reader, anywhere — it shimmers with magic, lust and love.”

“Summerlong” is set over the course of a long, hot summer in an isolated Midwestern college town. Don and Claire Lowry, former college sweethearts who now have three children, aren’t sure their marriage will survive; they’re facing a foreclosure and other financial pressures and are looking for escape. Claire finds herself attracted to an aimless young man who’s returned home to organize his dying father’s personal papers, while Don befriends a recent graduate who’s drifting through life in a haze of marijuana smoke and depression after the death of her first lover.

As erotic bonds develop and dissolve and loyalties are tested, the four seem to be hurtling toward heartbreak. Yet, in Bakopoulos’s assured narrative hands, a surprising second act is in the offing.

“Bakopoulos writes with great heart and a cold eye, and his limpid, ironic prose will appeal to those who like the early work of Martin Amis,” praised Library Journal.

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of New York Times Notable Book “Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon” and “My American Unhappiness.” He holds an MFA from University of Wisconsin- Madison and is the winner of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is the writer-in-residence of English at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa.