They Shot Kennedy

For a kid named Cribbsy, the month of November, 1963, was a private train wreck weeks before JFK undertook his fatal motorcade in Dallas.
Cribbsy is tangled in a half-dozen romantic crises. He’s hounded by malevolent dwarfs. He’s under threat of suspension by a vicious vice-principal. He’s at war with his English teacher. Every time he sets foot in the halls, he faces death at the hands of a delusional gridiron gladiator.
Cribbsy’s trials trace America’s loss of innocence. Kennedy has faced down Khrushchev over Cuban missiles, but every kid grows up with the haunting certainty that his life—all life—will end beneath a mushroom cloud.
As the nation mourns JFK, Cribbsy’s troubles mount. He becomes an unwitting felon. He receives an unexpected overture from the yummiest girl in school. He faces a showdown with his raging nemesis. He knows what happened in the Art Room. And he has a conversation—both crushing and illuminating—with the Playmate of the Month.

David Benjamin began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two  short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport.

Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.