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Tax-exempt? Read an interview | Campus Sexpot A Memoir In 1962 David Carkeet's drowsy hometown of Sonora, California, snapped awake at the news that it had inspired a smutty potboiler titled Campus Sexpot. Before leaving town on short notice, the novel's author had been an English teacher at the local high school, where Carkeet was a hormone-saturated sophomore. Leaving was a good idea, it turned out, for most of the characters in Campus Sexpot had been modeled after Sonora's citizens. Carkeet uproariously recaptures his stunned, youthful reaction to the novel's sleazy take on his hometown. The innocent nowhere burg where he despaired of ever getting any "action" became, in the pages of Campus Sexpot, a sink of iniquity echoing with "animal cries of delight." Blood pounded, dams of passion broke, and marriages and careers-not to mention the basics of good writing-went straight to hell. As Carkeet relates his own romantic fumblings to the novel's clumsy twists and turns, he also evokes the urgently hushed atmosphere in which the book circulated among friends and neighbors. Eventually, Carkeet stumbles into adulthood, where he discovers a truer definition of manhood than the one in the pages of the pulp fiction of his youth. A wry look at middle-class sexual mores and a witty appreciation of the art of the hack novel, Carkeet's memoir is, above all, a poignant and hilarious coming-of-age story sure to revive our own bittersweet teenage memories. David Carkeet's writings include five novels, three of which are New York Times Notable Books: Double Negative, The Greatest Slump of All Time, I Been There Before, The Full Catastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways. His short stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The North American Review, The Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine, and The Village Voice. He resides in Vermont. September 2007
ISBN 0820330132 paper • $16.95 152 pp. • 5 1/2 x 8 in.A volume in the seriesAssociation of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction "Campus Sexpot is a gloriously inventive, funny, piercing memoir of coming of age in a small Sierra town in the sixties. Using as a foil a pornographic potboiler set in the town, the author develops a wide range of feeling and observation-creative nonfiction at its best." —Brian Doyle, author of Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies"David Carkeet has a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest and most entertaining comic writers working today. In Campus Sexpot, his first memoir, Carkeet turns his attention to small-town America, to the strangeness and hilarity of SEX, and to the fascinating and beautifully observed contradictions that lie at the center of family life. Campus Sexpot is an addictive joy to read." —John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake"[A] saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction ... In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years."-Publishers Weekly "Campus Sexpot is a hilarious tour through the embarrassment of adolescence and small-town families. For female readers, it's also an education on American boyhood."-J. Gordon, Nighttimes "Carkeet ... knows to milk a joke and then fix without flinching on the sad human dramas fueling them."-Anneli Rufus, East Bay Express "Memoirs are, by definition, unique in their content. But leave it to David Carkeet, former St. Louisan and novelist extraordinaire, to take the form a step further with his own inventive coming-of-age story ... 'Campus Sexpot' does not disappoint."-The St. Louis Post-Dispatch"[Carkeet] gets very creative with creative nonfiction in this funny and oddly compelling memoir ... smart and ingeniously put together."-Creative Loafing in Charlotte "It's hard to find fault with such a charming and frequently hilarious book . . . the connections Carkeet sees between his world and that of the novel turn his personal story into something far bigger. Only the best memoirs, like Campus Sexpot, reach beyond the author's own experiences and address bigger coming-of-age issues familiar to us all."-The Washington Post Book World "a work that starts out as humorous critique and becomes a thoughtful small-town reminiscence and memoir ... marked by a humane understanding."-CNN.com "[Carkeet] reveals juicy, sometimes ironic connections between pulp and reality ... The portrait of a way of life that emerges is richly detailed, fond without being sentimental...It's literary criticism like you've never read before ... anyone who's ever browsed a shelf of vintage pulp novels will appreciate the insights of Carkeet's version of Campus Sexpot, even in an age when salacious prose is easy to come by."-Seven Days "The masterful novelist ... gives readers a memorable glimpse of his rural California adolescence. As always, Carkeet is wonderfully inventive."-Sunday Post-Dispatch "A fun read that feels a lot more like a novel than the memoir that it is." -Blue Ridge Business Journal |
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