Please Don't Come Back from the Moon（ISBN=9780156031677）

"When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon." Thus begins this debut novel about the mysterious disappearance of the men from a working-class suburb of Detroit. They go gradually, one by one, leaving for parts unknown—though more than one mentions the rocky orb up above. Michael Smolij's father is one of the last to vanish; once he's gone, Michael's musician mother plays "Norwegian Wood" on her violin, then takes two jobs to make ends meet. Michael, like all the boys in the neighborhood, has to grow up fast, working at the mall while taking community college courses. When Michael's mother remarries and moves away, leaving him the family house, Michael lands a job as a writer at a local radio station and starts dating a single mother with a five-year-old son, as if in an attempt to singlehandedly forge a new family for himself. The process of settling down, however, awakens a strange restlessness in him. Magic serves more as an emotional undercurrent than a mystery in this odd novel, part fable and part gritty realist chronicle. As Bakopoulos writes in an author's note, the book is a kind of elegy for his father's generation of downtrodden working-class men, but their disappointments are tempered by the modest hopes and ambitions of their sons in this gentle and moving tale. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (Publishers Weekly )The term “heartbreaking” appears frequently in reviews of this debut novel, whose title is derived from a Charles Mingus jazz composition. With its undercurrent of magic and social satire, Michael’s coming-of-age story struck a strong chord with most critics. The main character is, at times, annoyingly indecisive, but the 12 years of his life presented in this compelling story ring true. Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon should be read as a tribute to the past generation of working-class American men. (Bookmarks Magazine )By deftly welding magic realism with social satire, Bakopoulos captures the dark side of the working-class dream. Maple Rock is stuck in a nightmare, and the lure of walking away still draws its young men. Mikey, like his father and like his friends, must decide to resist or to heed the call of ''No more, I'm heading for the moon.'' (The New York TImes-Elissa Schappell )

T he summer Michael Smolij turns seventeen, his father DEAN BAKOPOULOS, a former book-disappears. One by one other men also vanish from the seller, was named one of America's blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit where their fathers best new fiction writers by Virginia before them had lived, raised families, and, in a more prom-Quarterly in 2004. He lives in Madison, ising era, worked. One man props open the door to his shoe Wisconsin. store and leaves a note. "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash." The abandoned wives drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives and shaking off the belief in an American dream that, like their husbands, has proven to be a thing of the past. Unable to leave the neighborhood their fathers abandoned, Michael and his friends stumble through their twenties until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away. Hailed as "a triumph" by O, The Oprah Magazine, this haunting, unforgettable debut novel is for anyone who has ever been left longing.

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

1 please don't come back from the moon
2 some memories of my father
3 summer, 1992
4 the calming effect of jelly doughnuts
5 a newcomer's guide to ann arbor
6 the boy with the backward chakra
7 capable of love
8 knights of labor
9 the warning signs and symptoms of depression
10 please don't come back from the moon (reprise)