Stories in the collection were originally published in literary journals such as Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Shenandoah, and Post Road.
Set mostly in Texas and the American Southwest, the stories sympathetically depict the blue-collar lives of oil riggers, railroad and steel construction workers, x-ray technicians, waitresses, and a con man who tries to buy Costa Rica and examine themes of multi-generational family dynamics, adolescence, and the tension between work and personal relationships.
Set in the fictional Texas Panhandle town of Charnelle, against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, the novel examines the intellectual and erotic coming of age of a young woman, as well as the legacy of parental abandonment.
[3] Marrying Kind (Ice Cube Press 2019), Cook's third collection of linked stories, explores the people, vocations, and places we wed ourselves to.
The final section, "Under the Influence," investigates both literary and nonliterary influences and includes ambitious essays that combine memoir with literary criticism, especially essays on the late Larry McMurtry (fellow Texan writer who Cook wrote his master's thesis in literature about) and Sena Jeter Naslund (the bestselling author of Ahab's Wife and founding director of Spalding University's low-residency MFA in Writing Program, where Cook has been a member of the graduate faculty since 2004).
The final and most personal essay, "My Hamlet," tracks Cook's intimate thirty-five year relationship with Shakespeare's play—as a student, actor, English professor, writer, son, father, brother, and heart-attack survivor.
From 1992 to 2013, he taught creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona, where for several years he served as the Arts & Letters Chair and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs.