David Winner

Books

Master Lovers (2023)

a twisted puzzle of love and fascism

While clearing out his great aunt’s midtown apartment after her death, author David Winner discovered artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930s. His Aunt Dorle had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-century classical music world. But the more he learned about her world, the more complicated her story became — a twisted puzzle full of fascism and fraud, and a record of a young woman grappling with her attraction to lovers with hair-raising political ties.

Reviews

Outpost 19
ISBN: 9781944853884

“This book is a brilliant concoction, equal to the ingredients that might have been combined in Dorle’s cocktail shaker: fact, fiction, revelation, riddles.  It has a sad ending – though one that is so kind.  The tenderness broke my heart.”

– Ann Beattie

“A peculiar but mesmerizing work of biography” — Kirkus Reviews

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Related Writings

Enemy Combatant (2021)

ENEMY COMBATANT is a hyper-charged misadventure driven by a young American’s rage against his government.
After stumbling on evidence of CIA secret prisons in Armenia and Georgia, Peter recruits an old friend to help free a dark-ops detainee — an impossibly reckless prison-break mission, with no skills and no resources, no connection to the captured soldiers and no solid plan for getting home — fueled by too much alcohol, a pressure-cooker marriage and the recent death of a parent. Set during the second Bush administration, ENEMY COMBATANT takes readers on a fantastical, adrenaline-packed journey from a smelter in Caucasia across the Turkish borderland to Homeland Security at JFK.
Dark, comic and action-packed, ENEMY COMBATANT is the story of an aggrieved man acting out on the global stage, a raucous portrait of collateral damage from America’s war on terror.

“A searingly insightful tragicomic adventure that lays bare personal and political fault lines.” — Kirkus (starred review)

Outpost 19

“ENEMY COMBATANT covers a lot of territory, factually and metaphorically. It appropriates Americana, from road movies to virtual reality games, and provides –as the cliché goes — ‘a rollicking good time,’ while undercutting that notion entirely, as selfish, unaware, and dangerously self-serving. Sound like any country you’ve ever heard of? So, as I read it, this novel gathers its tropes and its metaphors as it speeds toward a kind of enlightenment for its two hazardously American male characters. It’s obviously a cautionary tale and a cosmic warning. To make a bad pun: It’s a take no prisoners book.” – Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck: A Novel

“With his unsettling and completely original style, Winner brings together the buddy film, the war on terror and extravagant foreign settings in this novel that feels like a soon to be discovered blockbuster. Over and over, sentence by sentence we’re caught off guard, leaving us in state of eerie suspense the whole book through.” – Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen: A Novel

“David Winner’s hypnotic page-turner, ENEMY COMBATANT, takes us back to the Bush era, during the Trump one. Winner’s humor and agile imagination make the improbable story of two crazed Americans trying to rescue a prisoner from a CIA secret prison in Armenia both moving and believable.” – Karl Geary, author of Montpelier Parade

Writing the Virus (2021, co-editor)

WRITING THE VIRUS: NEW WORK FROM STATOREC MAGAZINE draws from writing published in the online literary magazine StatORec from mid-April to September 2020. Its 31 authors explore the experience of lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, and the politicization of the virus from a wide variety of perspectives. The majority of the texts were written exclusively for the Brooklyn- and Berlin-based journal, and a keen sense of urgency prevails throughout, an understanding that the authors are chronicling something, responding to something that is changing them and the social fabric all around them.

Contributors include Joan Juliet Buck, Rebecca Chace, Edie Meidav, Caille Millner, Uche Nduka, Mui Poopoksakul, Roxana Robinson, Jon Roemer, Joseph Salvatore, Liesl Schillinger, Andrea Scrima, Clifford Thompson, Saskia Vogel, Matthew Vollmer, and David Dario Winner, along with 15 others.

“Vivid testimony to the depth and breadth of suffering during this uniquely stressful time.” – Kirkus

Outpost 19

Tyler’s Last (2015)

“David Winner’s new novel is a double pleasure — for one, there is an engrossing thriller with an alternately hapless and capable scoundrel, flight and fight, twists and turns. . . The second pleasure is that that thriller is in the process of being written by an aging woman author who is transforming her own pursuits and betrayals in her fiction. This meta-move is clever, but it turns out to be much more than clever. She is, for all her high-handed treatment of her entourage, a memorably sympathetic and moving character. The two fictions reinforce each other resonantly. Bravo!” – John Casey

“It’s hard to describe David Winner’s fascinating and original book. On one level it’s satirical, but as with any kind of comedy, its performance depends on our understanding the riff being done on very serious matters. Also, as the author knows, the serious and the satirical are by now often synonymous in people’s minds, our society has become so absurd. I kept thinking of Hitchcock, and the way he made his audience voyeurs. David Winner’s method is similar, though there’s more than a whiff of Tarantino in the Hitchcock homage, as well. It’s riveting and funny, a sort of dazzling movie script that is a novel that involves another book within it. . . It comes at you cinematically, but with the advantage of a novel that alludes to literary models, as well. Its language is hipster shorthand for readers to absorb as they become spectators to the extravaganza, as the book, itself, expands into its political implications. Tyler is certainly the last person I would ever want to sit next to on an airplane.” – Ann Beattie

Outpost 19

The Cannibal of Guadalajara

Winner of the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award. Nominated for the National Book Award.

“Families come in all shapes and sizes; sometimes they sneak up on us fully formed. This is what happens to Margaret Heller after her divorce. Just as she’s settling into the rather lonely routine of a single person, she finds herself the center of an unorthodox version of a family.

As a lover, Dante Herreras isn’t such a great catch. His bevy of emotional problems make spending time with him an exercise in tension, and his style of coupling can be a turnoff. Inevitably, the attraction between Margaret and the younger Dante fizzles. But Dante and his welcoming family refuse to be abandoned. An excursion to Guadalajara for the birthday party of Dante’s uncle and childhood tormentor cements the new ties between Margaret, her ex-husband, and Dante, and they find themselves settling into the roles of parents and child, roles they had no idea they needed.
Winner, who won the Gival Press Novel Award, writes with great cunning and precision. A few of the scenarios his characters find themselves in—face down in a resplendent episode of masturbation among jungle plants, drinking martinis in the kitchen of old friends while a lover smashes antiques upstairs—border on ridiculous, but with grace, humor, and a steady hand, Winner transforms embarrassing moments into the briefest of epiphanies. Margaret, Dante and Alfred are as human as they possibly can be.” – Andi Diehn, Debut Fiction ForeSight Feature in the May/June 2010 issue of ForeWord Reviews

Gival Press