Introducing Zeke – one of the most unpredictable and charmingly deluded narrators to come along in years.

“WHY ARE YOU SO UNHAPPY?” That’s the question that Zeke Pappas, a thirty-three year old scholar and head of the “Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative,” asks almost everybody he meets as part of an obsessive project, “The Inventory of American Unhappiness.” The answers he receives － a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint － create a collage of woe. Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined a women’s magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some ‘prospects’: a newly divorced neighbor, a Starbuck’s barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola (“Why not aim high?”)

A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge. Zeke’s irreverent voice is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that is he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

 

Former bookseller, and author of the award-winning debut novel PLEASE DON’T COME BACK FROM THE MOON, Dean Bakopoulos is the founding director of the Wisconsin Book Festival and a creative writing professor at Iowa State University.

 

"Dean Bakopoulos is an American prophet -- who divines the end of optimism in this brilliant new novel that will choke you with tears and laughter. My American Unhappiness deserves a hallowed place on the shelf somewhere among Studs Terkel's Working and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer." ── Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh