Reviews
"Hilarious, bizarre, intricate, poignant, piercing, startlingly honest, eyepoppingly funny, and ultimately, to the reader's surprise and delight, a book not about lust but very much about love, mysterious and miraculous. A riveting book."
—Brian Doyle, author of Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies
"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."
"A fun read that feels a lot more like a novel than the memoir that it is."
—Blue Ridge Business Journal
"[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."
—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."
—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 (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.”
—Washington Post Book World
Description
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.
 |
Cloth |
 |
Paper List price: $17.95 978-0-8203-3013-6 9/1/2007 |
David Carkeet has published five novels, three of which (Double Negative, The Full Catastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways) will be reissued in conjunction with the release of a new novel, From Away, in 2010. He taught linguistics and writing for many years at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he also directed the MFA program and edited Natural Bridge, a literary journal. In 2003 he moved with his family to Vermont.
