Writers' Raves for David Carkeet's
Campus Sexpot: A Memoir!
Winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction
[That's David, standing tall on the book's jacket!]
“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
“A gloriously inventive, funny, piercing memoir of coming of age in a small
Sierra town in the sixties.” --Suzannah Lessard, author of The Architect of
Desire
“Carkeet has a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest and most
entertaining comic writers working today. In Campus Sexpot, his first memoir, he
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
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Carkeet (Error of Our Ways) revisits the 1962 scandal of his
Sonora, Calif., high school in this saucy, fanciful slice of creative
nonfiction. Campus Sexpot was a sexy pulp novel that appeared in the
author's small middle-class community when he was 15, reportedly written by a
former Sonora high school teacher who fled to Mexico. The steamy roman à clef
barely disguised the identity of the real characters involved in the affair
between a newly arrived English teacher, Don Kaufield (aka the book's author,
Dale Koby) and his 19-year-old, amply endowed student, Linda Franklin. 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. Carkeet
annotates excerpts from the novel, especially the seduction scenes between
nubile, willing Linda and her married teacher ("I'll try not to interrupt
anymore," promises Carkeet); he expands on notable characters and fills in
prurient information. The first Campus Sexpot ends with a heroic paean to
the father-son relationship; Carkeet concludes similarly with a tribute to his
upstanding father, who puzzled about people's choice of the dark side: "Why be
bad when you can be good?"
To Read More Reviews of Campus Sexpot, go to http://www.geocities.com/davidcarkeet/reviews.html
To Read More About David Carkeet, go to http://www.geocities.com/davidcarkeet/index.html
To Buy Campus Sexpot,
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