David Carkeet: 5 books

She tipped her head sideways, her lips offering themselves to his. He remembered the fire those lips contained, the promise her kiss held. . . . 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...

A New York Times Notable Book: “A comic chronicle of marital misunderstandings . . . Eccentric, hilarious, wildly inventive” (Los Angeles Times).   Linguist Jeremy Cook knows how language works, but he doesn’t know how marriage works. In fact, he is strangely hostile to the institution....

A linguist tries to solve a murder mystery in this Edgar Award–nominated novel: “Intelligent, unpredictable . . . and extraordinarily funny” (San Francisco Chronicle). Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by...

“If Alfred Hitchcock could remake Fargo, it might feel something like Carkeet’s comic-absurd latest” (Publishers Weekly). Denny Braintree, a wisecracking loner devoted to model trains, has found himself stranded in Vermont. His night at the hotel begins promisingly—until his prospective...

New York Times Notable Book: “The sorrows of Job [visit] a St. Louis nut salesman, with hilarious results . . . [A] wry updating of the biblical tragedy” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).   In this “astute, entertaining novel,” two very different men cross each other’s paths in St. Louis,...