event Author Event: Dean Bakopoulos + Ben Percy

Former Madisonian Dean Bakopoulos is a tireless champion of all things literary, first as the director of the inaugural Wisconsin Book Festival, and later at the Shake Rag Alley Center For Arts & Crafts in Mineral Point. His greatest accomplishment so far, though, is Please Don’t Come Back From The Moon, a 2006 novel about working-class families in Detroit whose alpha-males start mysteriously disappearing. The Madison Review and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s reading (with a fall release party immediately following at the Orpheum Theater) pairs Bakopoulos with Ben Percy, another contemporary writer whose gritty, hyper-masculine short stories (as collected in 2007's Refresh, Refresh) might first seem at odds with the magical realism found in Please. Don’t believe it. Both share a gift for examining social issues honestly, intelligently, and without having to lean on the overused crutch of ironic detachment. Both have new novels due out in 2010: Bakopoulos' My American Unhappiness and Percy's The Wilding.

Updated 12/03/2009