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Summerlong - Dean Bakopoulos - 06/20/2015 - 7:00pm

Summerlong

Dean Bakopoulos, whose work New York Times bestselling 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. Mixing the light-hearted with the literary, this third novel from the acclaimed writer 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, college sweethearts, now with three children, aren’t sure their marriage will survive: they’re facing a foreclosure and other financial pressures, and 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.

Dean Bakopoulos

Dean Bakopoulos

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.

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Summerlong