David Winner
David Winner is the author of three novels: the Kirkus-starred Enemy Combatant (2021), Tyler’s Last (2015), and the National Book Award–nominated The Cannibal of Guadalajara (2010). He is the co-editor of the New York Times–noted anthology of pandemic writing, Writing the Virus, and his most recent book—a fiction/nonfiction exploration of his great-aunt’s love affairs in the 1930s—Master Lovers (2023), was Kirkus–recommended and a PW/BookLife Editor’s Pick.
His short work has appeared (among other places) in The Millions, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Manuskripte (in German), and The Village Voice. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of the Rome-based The American, and a frequent contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. He also writes a monthly column for 3 Quarks Daily.
Upcoming from David Winner
Image by Clifford Thompson, essayist and graphic novelist
The Berber Father
Gian, a desperately ill and peculiarly tanned creature with a bleached blond crew cut, gets detained at JFK airport towards the end of the second Trump administration. My new novel, The Berber Father, details what brought him there On a Zoom call just before he dies of Covid, Gian’s father orders his son to go to Rome. While there, he learns a family secret that sends him on to Tunis to meet the Berber who may or may not be his real father. Back in America, Gian is haunted by family ghosts in the old house in Virginia where he grew up. When he sells the house to a much younger family, two black doctors and their children, the strange white ghosts haunt them too. The Berber Father is a poignant, comic ghost story; an exploration of ethnic and cultural identity; a dystopian tale of the near future; and a rude warning that even the most self-indulgent, apolitical characters can get caught in the web of American politics in the 2020s.
Master Lovers (2023)
a twisted puzzle of love and fascism
Master Lovers by David Dario Winner is a “fictional memoir” that blends history, biography, and novelistic reconstruction, centered on the life of his great-aunt, Dorle Jarmel Soria, a Jewish woman in the classical music world. After her death, Winner discovered love letters and other artifacts that revealed her complex relationships with men who had ties to fascism, forcing him to confront difficult questions about love, history, and complicity. Called a “brilliant concoction,” by Ann Beattie, author of the New Yorker Stories and a “gem” by Clifford Thompson, author of Jazz June, recently short-listed for the Pen essay collection award, Master Lovers is Kirkus recommended and a PW/Booklife editor’s pick. Art Fuse calls it, “deft, believable, and vividly imagined.” And The Washington Independent Review of Books, in an interview with the author, calls it a “unforgettable portrait of an adventurous young Jewish woman determined to live life on her own terms while implicated by the dark forces of her era.” See other reviews, interviews, and writings involving Master Lovers here.
Selected Praise
“A devilishly delicious and disorienting novel.” — Joy Williams, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist and Guggenheim Fellow on The Cannibal of Gudalajara
“This book is a brilliant concoction… The tenderness broke my heart.” — Ann Beattie, on Master Lovers
“A searingly insightful tragicomic adventure.” — Kirkus (starred review), on Enemy Combatant
The Berber Father
Coming Soon
David Winner 