David Winner

Enemy Combatant, David Winner's third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher's Weekly/Booklife Editor's Pick. He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times-noted Anthology. His Kirkus-recommended second novel, Tyler's Last, was nominated for a Pushcart while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review, The Forward, and (in German) Manuskripte. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, a frequent contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, and a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. His most recent book, Master Lovers, is Kirkus-recommended and a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick.

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

When I discovered five sets of love letters to my great-aunt Dorle from the 1930s hidden in her apartment after death, I embarked on Master Lovers, an attempt to tell the stories of these affairs. I couldn’t figure out how to time-travel back to that era, but I could watch old movies. Since these were love affairs, I preferred early 1930s movies before the motion picture codes censored salacious details. Barbara Stanwyck as Lily in Baby Face is a juicy example. After her evil father’s still blows up with him inside, she hops on a train with her black friend, Chico (a surprisingly not-so-racist portrayal), to New York where she sleeps her way into the corridors of money and power. Not exactly Dorle, of course, but the Manhattan spaces and the period dialogue were useful to me.

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?

Maybe not particular periods, but oddball leaders fascinate me. Ahmed Muhtar Zogolli, the leader of Albania from 1922-1939 created a fake royal family by declaring himself King in 1928 and turning his close associates into fake nobility. King Zog danced a complicated dance with Albania’s friends and adversaries in the 1930s: the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks, the Italians, and the Germans.  Before she married my grandfather and became an important figure in my childhood, Giselle fled her native Poland after the Germans had killed her father and brother and went to Rome.  After the war, she started to hang out at Café Cigno, the swan café, where a group of Albanian brothers would hold forth.  Zog fake nobility, they called themselves the Crowned Princes in the Court of Egypt. Giselle married one of them. Though they only remained married for a couple of years and her next husband, my grandfather, was no noble, fake or otherwise, Giselle called herself principessa in Rome all the way up to the 1980s. 

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

Yes, and it strikes at the oddest times. Quite unexpectedly, I ran into a neighbor on the street a year or so ago who announced to me that she’d read and liked one of my books. That sort of thing, which has very seldom happened to me, is the stuff of fantasy, daydreams though my biggest one, sitting next to a random person on a plane or subway or bus who is reading one of my books, has never come close to happening. Anyway, after my neighbor praised my book, I clammed up, stuttered, and took off as if I’d had some sudden GI crisis.

What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?

Like many of us, I’m born of contradictions. From zero to about fifteen, I was an obedient son, dressed by my mother in khaki pants and velour shirts, listening to the classical music revered in my family. A change in high school, a change in friends, and I was…well…I was fucking punk, man!  The Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Gang of Four, and, of course, the Clash. When images of the Clash’s first album were being tie-dyed onto shirts in high school all I had available was a green turtleneck bought for me by my mother on which Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simenon looked ridiculous.

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?

My father’s multitude of books and records filled the many shelves that he built in the old house in which I grew up in Charlottesville.  He and my mother were the recipients of endless objects from my great aunt, and my grandmother: chairs from America, tile tables from Italy, stone Krishnas from India. As a kid, I collected objects too: baseball cards, then football cards, then basketball and even hockey cards, and, when we lived briefly in England, soccer, and cricket cards. But, somehow, as I grew up and grew middle-aged, I became a collector in reverse, an anti-collector, a master of the losing and abusing of objects. I say with this sorrow rather than pride because I love and respect those who love and respect things. I’m lucky in a way because it’s a fairly mild sociopathy. People do exist for me at least most of the time, but objects do not. I lose and batter them with inexplicable brutality.