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 and (in German) Manuskripte. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, and a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. Master Lovers, a non-fiction work inspired by hidden love letters from the 1930’s, comes out in November. Angela Starita is a non-fiction writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Believer, Gourmet, Salon, the New York Times, and many other publications. She currently works as senior writer for the Cooper Union, a college for architecture, art, and engineering in New York City, and teaches classes at the New Jersey Institute of Technology on the intersection of Brazilian cultural and racial identity and the built environment. With her background in architecture history, she has a particular interest in the impact of design on community.
by Angela Starita Years ago while teaching a college composition class in Jersey City, NJ, I met a student named Denise James. She was lanky and sullen and looked upon her fellow classmates with a combination of suspicion and boredom. Yet somehow, she had an affection for me. She’d stay after class to ask a…
by David Winner A neighbor I ran into out walking his dog in our Brooklyn neighborhood asked me about my recent trip to Chile and relayed his own experience there. He loved the skiing, the landscapes, the wine, but he could not abide the stray dogs. But stray dogs, more than anything, had brought me…
by David Winner Jessie Buckley, an incredible actress, breathes life into the role of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, in Hamnet. Like others in the film, her face is always a little dirty (Chloé Zhao, the director, doesn’t fall for the trap of giving characters in dirty times perfectly clean skin), but I was frustrated by her…
by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist “Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t remember anything about “Texts Under Pressure,” the panel we were…
by Angela Starita Large-scale housing projects have been the subject of the public’s wrath and ardor for at least the last 70 years. Considering the extraordinary housing crises in cities across the country, it’s not surprising that Herman Jessor, the engineer-turned-architect behind the best-known cooperative developments in NY, is the subject of two studies and…
by David Winner Having reached the ripe old age of sixty-one more or less in one piece, I wonder at which moments I may have been most in danger. Were there ever rogue cancer cells that never quite manifested? Planes or cars or buses that almost crashed. Appearances can be deceptive. The safe can be…
by Angela Starita When my mother was a teenager in the early 1940s, a NY-area radio station ran a weekly contest, asking listeners to vote for their favorite singer among two: Crosby or Sinatra? How people made this preference known remains unclear to me: did you need a phone in your house to make a…
by David Winner In an interview with Ezra Klein about LGBTQ rights, Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of congress, talks about a “sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.” I don’t know about that, but before the 2024…
by David Winner The election of a black president in 2008 invoked a groundswell of rage among white American racists that led to Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016. The rage was so intense, the MAGA storyline so compelling, that many white folks (along with increasing numbers of non-white folks) believed Trump’s false story that…
by Angela Starita Over the past six years, I’ve intermittently studied weaving. For reasons unknown to me, I’ve wanted to weave for at least the last 20 years, but only as a distant dream. It was part of a larger fantasy, one I wrote an essay about years ago: riding a bike to a clean…
by David Winner I’m the comic relief here, not much else is funny. After the inauguration, I began to feel the siren call of the southern border: so mystified, so lied about, so central to our recent political troubles. And despite all the real horrors (the deportations and detainments) and invented horrors (undocumented people wreaking…
by Angela Starita Teddy lives in two houses. They’re equally bereft of taste–good or bad. Teddy’s a dog and his nominal doghouse is inside the house of his owner, Jonathan. It’s built inside the closet under a stairway, with its entrance, the side facing Jonathan’s living room, covered in pale rusticated stone. Jonathan calls it “the world’s most famous…
by David Winner When Taylor Swift was living in New York about a decade ago, she misused one of our classic expressions. Bodega means more than just corner store. Tooling around Santo Domingo about the same time Taylor was living in New York, I stopped periodically at its ur-bodegas. Generally lacking what Americans call “amenities,”…
by Angela Starita Driving through Journal Square in Jersey City with a friend, we’re both amazed by the construction that has happened there in the last two years. In this case, amazement is a form of horror: the new buildings, an array of towers, are grotesquely out of scale with the rest of the city.…
by David Winner Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness. My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our Charlottesville home with his lower half exposed. …
by David Winner After Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother. Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran…
by Angela Starita Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with…
by David Winner Angela, my wife, and I are over-educated middle-class white New Yorkers of a certain age. When Angela taught at a GED program run out of a housing project on Avenue D in Manhattan’s East Village in the early nineties, she was known as blanquita, little white girl, an accurate and affectionate diminutive…
by Angela Starita In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges…
by David Winner I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala. But first a little background. In the Charlottesville,…